


Reckoning

by Annerb



Series: Down Here Among the Wreckage [3]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, Apocafic, Darkfic, End of the World, F/M, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-09
Updated: 2010-04-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:21:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22789402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annerb/pseuds/Annerb
Relationships: Samantha "Sam" Carter/Jack O'Neill
Series: Down Here Among the Wreckage [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1635658
Comments: 10
Kudos: 45





	1. Prologue

Cam is running.  
  
There’s a path of sorts ahead of him, but he’s not following it. Instead he’s darting in and out of the crumbled remains of what had once been concrete buildings and metal sheds, dodging mangled rebar and fallen trees, trying to be as small a target as possible.  
  
There was a time this planet was known as Delta Site. A time a human population of about five hundred called this place home, or at least as close to home as an alien planet can be. Now there’s just rubble and a crazy lunatic running for his life.  
  
Cam’s heartbeat is thudding away in his head, sweat trailing down his neck into his shirt, but the pounding he’s really worried about are the tromping footsteps behind him that refuse to slow. Something that can be said about Anubis’ drone soldiers is that they don’t tire. They just keep moving until they die.  
  
Cam really hopes he isn’t about to find out what that feels like.  
  
A blast smacks into a tree just to Cam’s right and he ducks left, ignoring the scent of ozone and charred wood as he sprints for the low cover offered by what had once been a school. Walls once filled with young voices and the hope of a future generation, only now charred out. There’s been nothing but silence since Anubis found Delta and snuffed it from existence.   
  
Cam darts a reckless glance back over his shoulder, estimating exactly how much of a lead he has left. Not enough, he thinks, just as he finally catches sight of what he’s aiming for. Pumping his legs as hard as he can, he pours whatever last reserve he’s got left into crossing the distance.  
  
“Now!” he bellows as he jumps the low wall, his shoulder slamming into the dirt as he hits the ground and rolls.   
  
Kate Ortiz pops up next to him and he gets a brief impression of her face screwed up in determination as she hefts her gun. He thinks she may yell as she pulls the trigger, but then there’s a bright pulse of light and loud sound like an electric whine. Cam instinctively slaps his hands over his ears, squeezing his eyes shut. He’d probably bury his head too if there were a nice patch of sand handy.  
  
He holds that position, waiting for the final blow, but as the seconds tick by, everything settles into stillness. Cracking one eye open, Cam looks up at Ortiz, still standing, staring off back in the direction he’d come from.  
  
She looks a bit…stunned. But alive.   
  
Alive is good.  
  
“Did it work?” Cam asks, unfolding out of his protective posture, but not getting to his feet. Three years at the SGC taught him caution.  
  
Ortiz lifts one hand to her hair, brushing back at dark strand that has escaped her ponytail. “I think…I think maybe it did.”  
  
Just to be sure, Cam drags himself to his feet, peering suspiciously over the edge of the crumbled wall. The thing is sprawled on its back about thirty yards away, looking pretty damn dead. Gesturing for Ortiz to stay behind the cover offered by the wall, Cam cautiously approaches the polymer-clad, wannabe Darth Vader lying in the dirt. Stepping closer, he taps it with his foot. It jiggles a bit, but doesn’t protest or get up and kill him, so Cam kicks it again, a lot harder this time—mostly for fun. Only his toe doesn’t think it’s so fun.  
  
Hopping on one foot, he twists back around to look at Ortiz, flashing her a grin. “Well spank me rosy,” he says. “That actually worked. Remind me to kiss McKay when we get back. I don’t care how ugly he is.”  
  
Ortiz smiles, but her eyes are still on the soldier, and there’s no humor, only sorrow and something like confusion.  
  
“Kate?” Cam asks.  
  
She jerks a little, dragging her gaze from the soldier. “I thought…it would feel better,” she says, one shoulder lifting in a half-shrug. “More satisfying. Finally killing the thing that killed us.”  
  
Kate Ortiz was barely a college grad when her family was first tapped to escape Earth. One among thousands set up on another planet to start a colony, to ensure the survival of the human race. She was one of only three to survive when Anubis’ drone showed up here. It was one of the first attacks by the new soldier and it had only taken one to completely wipe them out, taking a hell of a lot of the last vestiges of hope they’d represented.  
  
She’s not a soldier, not really. Simply a woman put in a position where fighting may be all there is left. She’s put on the uniform, done the training, but she’s still an orphan looking for answers, finding only uncomfortable truths instead.  
  
Revenge doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t bring people back.  
  
“No, it doesn’t. Not really,” Cam admits. “But I promise, standing on Earth again…that _will_ feel better.”  
  
She glances down at the weapon in her hands, as if finally considering the long-term implications of this tiny face off today.  
  
They can finally fight back.  
  
She smiles, and this time, it reaches her eyes.  
  
Cam grabs his radio. “Hey, Charles,” he says into it. “Contact Reynolds. It works.”  
  
A garbled shout—something like a yeehaw—filters back through. “Yes, sir!”  
  
Cam rubs at his bruised shoulder, looking down at the drone. Now that the adrenaline is fading, he’s remembering that he promised McKay he’d bring the body of Mr. Doom and Gloom here back for study. He feels his smile slipping. “Remind me, how did we get stuck with this job again?”  
  
Ortiz hefts the weapon on her shoulder. “We were the only two stupid enough to volunteer.”  
  
“Right. Of course,” Cam says. “Lucky us.”  
  
“Yeah,” Ortiz says, giving the drone a solid kick of her own. “Lucky us.”


	2. Steady Pull

McKay’s lab is as empty as Sam has ever seen it. Everyone with even the tiniest amount of technical skill has spent the last three weeks in the storage bays, modifying every weapon they have to emit the energy pulse to disable Anubis’s drone soldiers.

This leaves only Sam and McKay in the lab digging through a backlog of research, trying to find anything that might increase the chances of success of the mission to retake Earth. Unfortunately this means that McKay has given up any pretext of not being obsessed with her quilt. Sam thinks she may have to smother him with it if he looks at her one more time with that half-confrontational, half-wheedling gaze of his.

“What about this?” McKay asks, jabbing a finger at an equation he’s copied to a whiteboard. There are four such boards hung side by side, covered with her numbers, and none of them make any more sense to her than they do to McKay.

“I don’t know,” she says, keeping her gaze averted from the numbers. It hurts to look at them.

McKay eyes her, and for a second she thinks he’s going to push her on this, call her bluff, or maybe just ask why she bothered to come back if she was going to be so unhelpful. It’s just a flash though, quickly subsumed. She wonders what Daniel and Teal’c have threatened him with.

Don’t push her. She’s way too fragile.

McKay turns back to the numbers and she feels a beat of something that should be relief but instead tastes far too much like disappointment.

She doesn’t know why it’s easier to dismiss the numbers as echoes of insanity than to admit that maybe she hadn’t been quite as stoic as she thought that day her father told her about Earth. Maybe it’s hard to accept that a lot more has been going on than even she’s been aware of.

She lifts her eyes to the quilt and its familiar contours, letting the details blur out to something indistinct and comforting. She lets the familiar feeling build in her chest—blankness, numbness—but just underneath, memories. They rise sharp and uninvited, her skin tingling with an unexpected rush.

She’d been thinking about Earth and protection and what she possibly could have done to save them, if only she’d been there. That’s where the numbers came from, she realizes, it’s what they create, a leap of faith and logic, a way to turn brutality back on the assailant, how to neutralize violence. How she might have wrapped herself up in an impenetrable shield, how nothing would have been able to reach her—isolated, protected, perfect.

She’s still not sure if it’s a schematic or a fantasy.

But she must have known, even then, that it would lead her here. Inevitable.

McKay sighs, his pen skittering across the table. “It has to all mean something,” he mutters under his breath.

Like most people here, McKay is looking for a miracle. He’s just looking in the wrong place.

Sam pushes to her feet, trying to ignore the way her fingers are shaking, the breathless edge of panic never far from her chest. It’s all getting louder day-by-day.

McKay swivels to look at her as she makes her retreat. The disappointment on his face is obvious, but to his credit, she can see that he’s at least trying to hide it. “Yeah,” he says, nodding like it was his idea in the first place. “Why don’t we take a break?”

She’s already halfway to the door.

Out in the hall it’s quiet. Quiet, blissful calm, but it doesn’t last, voices echoing in the distance. There’s too many people here, too many knowing looks and high tension and it’s building up on her skin, threatening to flatten her.

What she really needs is to get away. Just for a little while, a few days to breathe. Only she doesn’t have anywhere to go. She’s scared that if she sets foot on Cimmeria again, she’ll never leave.

It’s dangerously appealing.

So instead she stays. Stays and tries not to crumble.

* * *

Jason Reynolds’s office is much like the man himself—Spartan, utilitarian, but with the occasional glimmer of forgotten comfort and camaraderie. There’s order here, certainly, but also memory. The stiff regularity of rows of binders and logs and rosters and maps are only occasionally interrupted with the few items that could be considered personal—a worn baseball tucked in next to a small color photo with curling edges, a spindly plant somehow kept alive in the underground space against all odds, and a framed drawing of the Enola Gay, whose symbolism Daniel can’t even begin to interpret.

He hadn’t known Reynolds all that well before the move to Omega. All he has are vague impressions of Reynolds and Jack serious and focused on joint missions, and almost gregarious on downtime, lobbing jokes and half-serious bets about whose team will end up inexplicably naked next. Serious and focused certainly still describe Reynolds now that he knows him better, but there isn’t much humor left. Daniel doesn’t know if that’s because there really isn’t much to laugh about anymore, or if like many commanders before him, Reynolds feels the need to keep himself slightly aloof from those he commands.

That had never been Hammond’s way, but Daniel feels disloyal even entertaining the comparison because it not only belittles all Reynolds has done for them, but also Hammond’s last great sacrifice, this feeling that the general had abandoned them rather than protecting their retreat. Idle comparisons don’t do either man justice.

Daniel drags his attention from the office around him and focuses back on the report in his hands. He meets with Reynolds here once a week on what careful calculations have told them are as close to quiet Thursday mornings as exist anymore. They sip the not quite coffee from ‘732 while Daniel updates him on the latest work done in the research and translation department. They are all still searching for that one alien cache with the power to change everything, their own private Holy Grail.

“Anything from that Ancient cartouche SG-4 found?” Reynolds asks.

Daniel nods. “There were several addresses on it, but we’ve already visited most of them. There is one they seem pretty excited about in particular though: P9R-872.”

“And?” Reynolds prompts, apparently hearing the hesitation in Daniel’s voice.

“No gate as far as we can tell,” he says. “It should take about three days by ship to get there.”

Reynolds whistles. It’s a SG team’s most feared mission—long-term space travel. Daniel thinks they’ve all become far too accustomed to the instantaneous after so long with the Stargates in their lives. No one has time for the journey.

“Do you think it could be important?” Reynolds asks, probably already mentally deciding who can be pulled off tasks, what ships can and can’t be spared. At any given time the guy has to have thousands of details and tasks up in the air, and Daniel in no way envies him that.

Daniel shrugs. “It could be. But I also wouldn’t bet my life on Gary’s grasp of nuance.” Making the jump from a word that might possibly mean depository if you twist it enough to assuming there is an Ancient repository on the planet says a lot more about Gary’s enthusiasm than his translation skills. Not to mention the small fact that the word depository and repository are not as synonymous as Gary may hope.

Reynolds is still mulling it over when there’s a brisk knock at the door. “Come,” he calls out.

Daniel looks up as Cam and Jack step into the office. “Look who’s back,” Cam says, hooking a thumb over his shoulder at Jack.

Reynolds leans forward, possible Ancient planet pushed aside. “Did you track down Ms. Mal Doran?”

“Eventually,” Jack says, stepping into the room and leaning back against a bookshelf. There’s something hard in his voice that Daniel takes to mean Vala had done her best not to be found. Despite Daniel’s misgivings, she had come through on the weapons delivery, but disappeared again soon after. Apparently her reluctance to get involved with their quest for the Lucian Alliance resurfaced with a vengeance. Jack’s been chasing after odd sightings of her on and off for weeks now.

“And?” Reynolds prompts.

“And she’s arranged an introduction.”

Daniel wonders exactly what Jack had to say or do to get it. As far as he can tell, Jack doesn’t seem to have any new bruises.

“When?” Reynolds asks.

“Four days.”

Reynolds’s hand twitches. “That soon?”

Jack shrugs as if to say, “It is what it is.” It’s not his job to think of the big picture, to know how all the pieces fit together, to foresee gaps and problems and double crosses. It’s Reynolds’s, whether he wants it or not.

“Okay,” Reynolds says. “You and Daniel—.”

Jack lifts a hand to stop him. “You’re going to need to find someone else.”

“What?”

“Trust me,” Jack says, “you do not want me there for that meeting.”

“Why not?”

He pulls a face. “Let’s just say the Lucian Alliance and I have had our disagreements over the years.”

“So you’re asking us to trust Vala?” Daniel asks.

Jack gives Daniel a wry smile that seems to question Daniel’s sanity. “Trust her? No. She’ll sell you out to save her own skin, never forget that. But right now her interests line up with yours and she’s the best bet you’ve got.”

A ringing endorsement.

“I’ll go, sir,” Cam volunteers.

Daniel doesn’t miss the way Reynolds’s eyes dart to Jack as if looking for his opinion on who should replace him. It’s becoming a dangerous tic. The way Jack stares back at Reynolds, his face schooled to stubborn blankness, tells Daniel he is more than aware of this.

Reynolds returns his gaze to his desk, staring down at the files in front of them as if he can portend the future in them if he just shifts through them enough. He rolls his neck and closes the file in front of him with a brisk snap.

“Okay,” he says. “Daniel, tell Gary we can’t get to the new address right now. And Jack, contact Vala. The meeting is on.”

Jack nods, pushing off the wall and heading for the door. Passing Cam, he pauses, darting a quick glance at Daniel. “Netan’s a slimy son of a bitch and smart as all hell,” he warns. “But if it’s power you’re after, he’s your guy.”

Cam nods, looking grateful for any insight of what it is he’s getting himself into.

“Just watch your back. And if Vala runs…” Jack slaps Cam on the shoulder, leaning into him. “For God’s sake, keep up.”

On that promising note, Jack disappears back out the door.

“Goody,” Cam says, crossing his arms over his chest. “Sound like this is going to be fun.”

“I can’t wait,” Daniel mutters.

The door closes after Cam as he leaves.

Behind his desk, Reynolds is still staring at the tangle in front of him, a giant Gordian knot waiting to be cut.

Daniel settles back in his chair, the small, framed drawing on the office wall catching his eye again. He considers that maybe what the Enola Gay is really about is reminding Reynolds that in the end, someone has to make that final call, decide to push the button.

No going back.

* * *

Jack is slouched in a chair in the back of Daniel’s office, his feet kicked up on something that could be a really old artifact. Daniel, working at his desk, hasn’t so much as glared in Jack’s direction, so he has to assume it isn’t all that important. Either that, or Daniel has just gotten used to things breaking.

Jack has been carting back and forth to Omega for almost four weeks now. Just long enough for Daniel to stop looking surprised every time he comes back. Now with the Netan thing finally set in motion though, Jack doesn’t have a heading. He’s left treading water like everyone else here. Daniel’s office is as good a place as any, he supposes.

There’s a soft knock at the door.

“Yeah,” Daniel says, not looking up from his desk.

Carter walks in, coming to a stop as she catches sight of Jack out of the corner of her eye. She turns towards him, the motion controlled, methodical. She nods, acknowledging his presence. He nods back. That’s pretty much the extent of their interactions these days, but it still feels like a small miracle. She’s getting used to seeing him around. Slowly.

He still almost automatically gets to his feet in slow, predictable steps, circling around the room so he’s not between her and the only exit. He sees her shoulders relax as she tracks the movement.

When he settles down in one spot again, Carter turns her full attention back to Daniel, the entire little dance between them having taken only moments. She hands Daniel a folder.

Daniel glances at it, his eyebrows scrunching. “P9R-872? Reynolds decided not to send anyone.”

She bites her lip, her eyes darting briefly to Jack. Turning back to the desk, she grabs a pen and scribbles something on a piece of paper. She shoves it towards Daniel.

“You want to go there,” Daniel says slowly like he’s trying to wrap his mind around Carter’s sudden interest in a planet the Ancients may have possibly once visited. “You think it’s really that important?”

She nods, but Jack’s more interested in the way her hand is fisted behind her back, one finger hooked in her belt like she’s agitated but trying to hide it.

“For your project?” Daniel asks.

She hesitates just a fraction of a second this time before she nods.

She’s lying.

Daniel doesn’t seem to notice. “There’s no Stargate there, Sam. And we don’t have any ships free to make the trip right now.”

Jack is absolutely certain it isn’t the destination she cares about, probably not even the mission. It’s all there in every angle of her body, the way she’s holding herself. She wants the time, the chance to get out of here. Jack figures she’s got to be feeling at least as claustrophobic as he is these days.

He thinks maybe that’s what makes him do it.

“I’ll take her,” Jack says.

Daniel’s eyes fly to him in alarm, his disapproval of the unexpected offer clear. It’s like an unspoken agreement, this idea that no one is going to push Carter, to expect too much from her, but Jack figures expecting too much from her is about as close to normal as they can ever hope to get. Or maybe he’s just sickly curious to see if she’ll actually push back.

Carter turns to look at him, something sharp and almost familiar in her eye like she’s perfectly aware that he’s testing her. He wonders if she knew what she was getting into when she didn’t ask him to leave while she had the chance.

“You don’t need me for the Netan thing anyway,” Jack reminds Daniel with a shrug.

Daniel looks like he really wants to object, to come up with any other plan, and Jack doesn’t blame him. But they both know that everyone else is already busy with other tasks, their meager population stretched dangerously thin.

There’s no other choice. It’s nice to have that work in his favor every once and a while.

“Is that okay, Sam?” Daniel asks when he comes short of any other options.

Carter opens her mouth as if to speak, but can’t quite force the words. Jack wonders if anyone else has even the slightest idea why.

His hand, tight around her throat. Her body helpless under his.

“Say it!”

Not even his fists convince her to speak.

Jack shakes free of the clinging memory. God, this is a really bad idea.

“Sam?” Daniel asks again.

She lifts her chin and nods firmly, managing to look a lot less panicked than he would have expected. Or maybe he just honestly hadn’t thought she’d take him up on the offer.

Hell.

“It’s settled then,” he forces himself to say with more nonchalance than he feels. “I’ll make sure the ship’s ready to go.” Turning on his heel, he strides out of the room, coming to a stop right out of sight.

“Sam,” he hears Daniel say.

There’s a shuffling sound like someone moving papers, but nothing more. Jack tries to imagine the unspoken.

“You don’t have to do this,” Daniel says. “We all understand how you feel…”

There’s the thump of a palm against a flat surface, a voiceless burst of temper that surprises him. In the following silence, he hears it.

“No, you don’t.”

The voice is low and thin, the words stiff like a foreign language on a clumsy tongue…but it’s her. Her voice.

Jack leans back against the wall next to the door. He’s not consciously eavesdropping, just can’t move away. He’s frozen to the spot. He hasn’t heard her voice in well over five years, and only then raised as a scream or a curse.

“I…I forgave him a long time ago,” she says. “He was a prisoner too.”

Jack closes his eyes.

“Then why….” Daniel’s voice trails off, clearly thrown by their behavior, by her inability to say so much as a word in his presence.

Daniel thinks he has it all worked out. Thinks he knows what really happened between them.

He doesn’t have a clue.

“Because this isn’t about what he did to me, Daniel,” she says, and it feels like Jack’s skin is too tight, squeezing out all his oxygen. “It’s about what I did to him.”

You should have killed me.

I know.

Jack pushes away from the wall, unable to bear hearing even one more of her words.

* * *

Teal’c opens the door to his quarters, his eyes sweeping across the space.

He finds Sam sitting against the wall with her knees drawn into her chest, an open cardboard box on one side of her and a small packed bag on the other. She’s changed into jeans and casual athletic shoes, but still wears her patched green shirt over a black T-shirt, her fingers picking at the threads in the shoulder. It seems the rumor he has heard is true.

“Sam,” he says, and she looks up at him, her eyes wide and cheeks pale. “You do not have to do this.”

Her arms flex around her knees, something in her eyes shifting as the stubborn line of her jaw lifts her chin. “Yes, I do.”

“You have nothing to prove.”

She shakes her head. “That’s not what this is about, Teal’c.”

“Are you certain?”

She stares back at him, but before she can answer there is a brisk knock at the door. She stares at it a moment before turning her regard once more to him. “I need to do this, Teal’c.”

Whether or not that is true, it seems equally clear that he will not be able to change her mind. He crosses the room and pulls the door open.

O’Neill stands on the other side, his body mired in the stillness that Teal’c still finds difficult to reconcile with the man he had once known. “Teal’c,” he says, nodding his head.

“O’Neill,” Teal’c answers, pulling the door wider.

“I’m looking for--,” he starts to say, stalling when his eyes find Sam. “Ah.” He gestures back over his shoulder. “The ship’s ready.”

Sam nods, pushing to her feet and shouldering her bag, nothing of hesitation in her stance. While the wisdom of this trip is still uncertain, her determination is not. There is nothing for Teal’c to do but step aside and hope that whatever it is she is looking for will not merely make things worse.

She pauses by his side, touching his arm and turning her face up to him. She gives him a small smile of farewell, her words having fled her completely.

Teal’c inclines his head. “Be well.”

She nods, her fingers squeezing his arm. Letting go, she walks to the door, her path keeping her as far from O’Neill as the small space allows. O’Neill quickly steps out of her way. They are both giving so much effort to staying out of the other’s way, to not looking at one another that Teal’c wonders how this mission can possibly work.

Once Sam is in the hall, O’Neill turns to follow her, but Teal’c stops him by reaching for his arm. “O’Neill, you will speak with me.”

His eyebrows go up, but he still steps back into the room as if he has accepted the fruitlessness of attempting to avoid this conversation. “Sure. Of course.” He turns to Sam. “I’ll meet you in the hangar?”

She nods, glancing between them, sending Teal’c a look he doesn’t find difficult to interpret. He has become accustomed to the assumption that any meeting between himself and O’Neill will end in blood, no matter how misplaced it is. The door closes behind her.

“You are going,” Teal’c observes.

O’Neill grimaces, perhaps finding criticism where Teal’c intends none. “We’ll be back. Long before Reynolds gets things moving.”

Plans have a way of spitting out and flaring like a candle in a careless draft. O’Neill’s intentions may very well mean nothing. No more than Reynolds’. No more than his own. But that is not why he has held O’Neill back.

He watches O’Neill, searching himself for the anger everyone suspects him of, the disappointment or betrayal that they say should be brewing in his chest. O’Neill lied to them, abandoned their cause mid-fight, and yet Teal’c feels none of this. Perhaps he truly is nothing more than the stone Ishta accuses him of being. And yet Teal’c finds it difficult to keep his eyes upon the once familiar face of his comrade.

Maybe O’Neill sees something of this because he shifts, his voice lowering. “I’m sorry, Teal’c.”

“For what reason?” For the real truth is that Teal’c begrudges O’Neill his decisions no more than he does Sam. They both faced an untenable situation in what may have been the only possible way. He accepts that and needs no apology for it.

O’Neill’s eyes shift, drifting past Teal’c. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be who you wanted me to be.”

Teal’c feels his heart leap in his chest, a dull throb that seems to radiate from his very bones.

I can save these people.

Many have said that. But you are the first I believe could do it.

That day on Chulak seems so far away now. Teal’c suspects neither of them really understood what it was they embarked on that day, nor the inexorable chain of events they had recklessly thrown into motion. And perhaps this is the real reason Teal’c has avoided O’Neill so well since his return, not out of anger, but of fear of what he represents—the foolish hopes Teal’c had once blindly clung to, this path they began together so many years before.

Teal’c swallows against the dryness in his mouth, the tightness in his throat. “These days we live in…this fate… None of this is the burden of a single man, no matter how much we both try to carry it.” Ishta would call it the foolishness of men, this need to carry blame, assign fault. No one man is so essential that his decisions alone can shape the destiny of an entire galaxy.

Teal’c tries to believe it.

He suspects O’Neill carries more than his fair share of guilt, but Teal’c understands that it can be no more O’Neill’s fault than his own because blaming either of them raises the question of this all being avoidable—that dying free means nothing.

He cannot bring himself to contemplate a universe where that is true, could not bear to live in it.

“We have both done what we must, and will continue to do so,” Teal’c says, holding his arm out.

There is a flicker of surprise across O’Neill’s face as he takes the offered arm, his grip firm above Teal’c’s elbow. “I think you may be the best man I have ever known, Teal’c,” he says.

If only that were so.

O’Neill releases his arm, attempting to step back away, but Teal’c holds him in place, his fingers biting into the flesh of O’Neill’s arm.

“Teal’c?” O’Neill asks, wariness once more leeching into his expression.

Teal’c meets his eye. “Though she seems strong, you would be a fool to assume all is well with her.”

The stony mask slamming down on O’Neill expression is not unexpected, but slightly chilling nonetheless. Teal’c does not retreat from it.

“You will take great care,” he insists.

O’Neill’s cheek flexes, something dark passing through his eyes. After a long moment, he nods. “I promise.”

Teal’c holds his gaze, impressing upon him the importance of this pledge. Eventually appeased that his message has been heard, he nods, dropping his arm. “Then I bid you good journey.”

O’Neill steps away, his face clearing, becoming once more inscrutable and unfamiliar. “Yeah, you too, Teal’c.”

Teal’c watches O’Neill stride from the room. He can only hope that the two of them will find some form of peace on their journey, rather than simply invent new ways to harm one another.

Just one more thing he can no longer control.

* * *

Carter is waiting for him in the hangar when Jack catches up with her. She looks so small, standing there uncertainly in the large space with nothing more than a small bag clutched in her arms. She’s pale, but he recognizes that stubborn angle to her spine, has seen it so many times before.

“Sorry about that,” he says, trying to squash that dangerous feeling of familiarity.

She shakes her head, eying him like she hopes to figure out what he and Teal’c had discussed just by looking at him.

“It’s fine,” he says. “Just a nice chat about old times.”

The look Carter shoots him seems aimed at reminding him that mute or not, she is no idiot.

Jack shakes his head, still not quite sure what that whole thing with Teal’c had really been about himself. “It’s fine,” he repeats, heading for his ship.

She follows him in and he can’t help turning to her as she enters, judging her reaction, watching the way she looks around the space.

“It’s not much,” he says.

It’s weird having her here, like he has to somehow account for what he’s done with the last five years.

Her eyes come to rest on the small bunk in the back, covered with a quilt he’s sure she recognizes. The one he couldn’t bring himself to trade. The one small part of her he’s allowed himself out here in the emptiness of space.

He’s not sure he deserves even that much.

Clearing his throat, he points to a hatch. “That one’s empty if you’d like to stow your stuff.” He glances at her pathetically small clutch of belongings and tries not to wince.

Deciding to quit while he’s ahead, he leaves her to get settled in and heads into the forward compartment to start the pre-flight routine.

He’s almost done when she reappears, settling in the other seat with her hands carefully tucked in like she’s scared of accidentally bumping something. He wonders if this is her first trip in a spaceship since... He ruthlessly shoves the thought aside.

“This is the Orfeo requesting permission for takeoff,” Jack says into his radio.

Carter looks expectantly at him, a question there, but Jack pretends not to notice. If she wants to know, she’s going to have to actually ask.

He gets a flash of Daniel’s horrified face in his mind, Teal’c’s words echoing in his ears. You will take great care. But the very fact that Carter is here tells him she’s been coddled long enough.

“You know, Carter,” he says, his hands still mechanically working their way through the preflight. “This trip probably won’t be the cake walk Daniel says it will be.”

Peripherally, he catches the wry twitch of her lips. ‘It never is,’ he can almost hear her thinking. At least he hopes. Because if not, he might just have Carter’s voice in his head too. Wonderful. It’s going to get crowded.

“I only point it out because if this is going to work,” he trails off, clearing his throat. Hell. “You’re going to have to be able to speak to me.”

He catches quick movement out of the corner of his eye. She’s looked sharply at him and he lets her take her time studying him, keeping his eyes straight ahead. There’s still time for her to jump out of the ship, to change her mind, to realize this is probably the worst idea they’ve ever entertained. He waits for it, part of him really, really hoping for it. Eventually she looks away, back out at the hangar.

“I know,” she says, voice barely above a whisper.

Jack lets his eyes close for a moment at the strange swamp of emotions conjured by her voice. It’s a relief, almost a triumph, but mostly…mostly it reminds him of the last time she spoke in his presence.

Jack.

He needs to get over this if they are going to get out of this alive. They both do.

Anhur thinks that’s funny as fuck.

Good luck, sport-o.

Asshole.

The radio crackles. “You’re clear to depart, Orfeo. The doors are open. Safe journeys.”

“Ready?” Jack asks her one last time.

She nods, the gesture halted halfway through as she forces herself to try again. “Yes,” she says, her breathing unnaturally even. “I’m ready.”

“Okay,” he says, forcing his attention back on the controls in front of him. He focuses down on the hum of his ship pulling back against gravity. Guiding them under the huge tunnel rising above them like a grain silo, the ships rises slowly through the layers of earth hiding the outpost from enemy eyes. He engages the cloak because the last thing Omega needs is traffic zooming in and out of the system in the odd chance that someone is actually watching.

Above them, the sky gradually lightens. He can hear Carter’s breath quicken, imagines her leaning forward, straining for that first glimpse of space, but keeps his eyes trained straight ahead on the grey walls like looking at her might just make this all disappear. With one last swoop of competing currents, they pull free of the moon, zipping up through the thin atmosphere.

Setting their course, Jack banks away from the brilliance of the system’s sun, aiming for the familiar, endless black.

And then it’s just the two of them.


	3. No Net Below

Jack shifts in his seat. He’s been at the controls for nearly nine hours now. He’s done long hauls like this countless times before, but normally he’s able to relax into it, let his mind shut off. There’s no chance of that today because it’s impossible to forget for even a moment that he’s not alone. Add this tension that won’t abandon his spine to the exhaustion building in his bones and he’s fairly well done for.  
  
Carter disappeared back into the hold less than an hour into their journey, mumbling something about getting some rest. He remembers thinking he was pretty impressed how quickly she’d gone from being mute to hiding behind her words. He hadn’t bothered trying to call her on it though because walking wide circles around each other is what they do now. He gets it. He’s just not sure it makes things easier the way it’s supposed to.  
  
Listening intently, Jack thinks he can just make out the sound of her moving around in the hold. “Carter?”   
  
There’s a long stretch of silence and he can almost imagine her standing on the other side of the door, trying to decide whether or not to play possum. He’s just about convinced she is going to ignore him when the door slides open.  
  
She steps into the edge of his peripheral vision.  
  
“You mind taking the wheel a while?” he asks, rubbing his shoulder.  
  
She doesn’t answer. He pushes out of the seat to find her staring at the controls, her hands clasped behind her. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say she looked…scared.   
  
“Carter?”  
  
She pulls her eyes away from the controls with visible effort, taking a step back. “I’d better not,” she says, but her eyes have already snapped back to the controls.  
  
“You’ve flown one of these things a dozen times,” he reminds her.  
  
She shakes her head. “That was a long time ago.”  
  
The ship is equipped with autopilot. It wouldn’t be a big deal to just let the ship take care of itself, even if that guaranteed Jack would never really hit deep sleep, one ear constantly open for the inevitable cluster fuck. But something about the way Carter is staring at the controls keeps him from offering it.   
  
“I need some sleep and we don’t have time to float in space while I do it,” he says.  
  
She doesn’t call his bluff and that’s just another sign that he’s stumbled over something.   
  
“Carter?” he presses.  
  
“I haven’t touched any technology,” she blurts, looking startled by the confession herself.  
  
What? “You haven’t…”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Since…?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Ever?”  
  
“No.” She’s still standing two feet away from the controls, staring at them with a painful sort of intensity.  
  
“Why?”  
  
She shrugs, careless, uninterested. “I just...haven’t.”   
  
He’s no psychologist, just knows people deal with the shit thrown at them in a million different freaky ways. He gets why she didn’t speak. That connection’s blatant enough for anyone to pick up on. But technology? Anhur was old fashioned, or more precisely, weak and unstable. There had never been fantastic gadgets used on her. Never anything more than Jack’s own fists.   
  
He looks down. These hands.  
  
 _They worked well enough._  
  
He watches her as she steps up to the back of the chair, her fingers biting into the headrest as she leans into it. She doesn’t fear it. She yearns for it.  
  
“Why?” he asks again, voice soft, but insistent.  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
He thinks he might. “Is that really what these last five years have been about? Punishing yourself?”  
  
She doesn’t look up at him, just continues staring at the controls. “Maybe,” she says.  
  
Carter isn’t supposed to be unsure. And certainly not supposed to admit it.  
  
“What about you?” she asks, turning it back on him, finally looking up at him. “Have you been punishing yourself?”  
  
“No,” he says. And it’s true. For him these last five years were about something else entirely. They were about searching, pushing away, keeping too busy to think, trying to stay always one step ahead. Trying to find a way not to be what’s he’s become.  
  
He doesn’t need to punish himself. Not when simply living is punishment enough.  
  
“Are you asking for my permission?” he asks, his chin jutting towards the controls.  
  
He sees the accusation strike home, the truth of it in her eyes before she deliberately looks away. Taking a deep breath, she reaches out and makes contact, sliding into the seat.   
  
“No,” she says. “Not anymore.”  
  
Just like that, he’s dismissed, their first real conversation brought to an abrupt halt.  
  
He watches her for a while, the way her hands move over the controls, stumbling through a long forgotten routine. He can feel the ship faltering slightly under her clumsy movements as she tries to remember, to work it all out.   
  
It’s the first time since he woke to find her staring at him in a dark shack on an alien planet all those years ago that he sees anything of industry or grace in her. This is not robotic subsistence, or simple going through the motions, but earnestness and remembrance layered in each motion.   
  
It’s a relief, he tells himself.   
  
He lies sleepless in his tiny alcove for hours, feeling the ship smooth out and find equilibrium under her care, and tries not to think too hard about why relief is the last thing he’s feeling.  
  
* * *  
  
Vala is fidgeting.   
  
Cam watches the way her hand keeps moving back to her hair over and over again as if having one hair out of place would be catastrophic. If he didn’t know any better he’d think she was on her way to a first date, not a meeting with the leader of the Lucian Alliance. Cam tries to judge Jackson’s reaction to this, but as usual he just looks like he’s trying to ignore her, his eyes instead on the two goons leading them down the hall of Netan’s Ha’tak.  
  
Not for the first time, Cam catches himself wishing O’Neill had come with them because Cam may not know Vala Mal Doran all that well, but he has a sinking feeling that fidgeting may just be a prelude to full out fleeing. Without O’Neill, she is the only one who has any idea what exactly they’ve gotten themselves into, their barometer of disaster, but he’s having a hard time reading her.  
  
The goons lead them into an office of sorts, one with a large desk sitting in front of an expansive window. As far as using décor to intimidate, Cam thinks Netan has learned a lot from whatever Goa’uld he stole this ship from.   
  
In front of him, Vala comes to a stop as she enters the room. “Well,” she says, hands propped up on her hips. “You wanted Netan and now I’ve given him to you. Have fun, boys.”  
  
Cam reaches for her arm. “Now wait a minute.”  
  
She smoothly sidesteps his grab and he sees the steel now, under her flashy good looks. “No time to linger,” she says, head tilting to the side. “I have a pressing appointment elsewhere.”  
  
Cam glances at Jackson, but he’s just got one eyebrow raised as if things aren’t already going to shit around them.   
  
Vala slips past him, no doubt heading for the exit and her ship, but stops mid-step, her face losing color. Cam follows her line of sight, and there is the man himself, he supposes, filling the doorway. Netan isn’t particularly tall, but what he lacks in height, he makes up in presence. The closely cropped goatee and black uniform might be overly cliché, but the guy hasn’t even opened his mouth to speak yet but still the air in the room already seems charged.   
  
“I think you’re going to stick around, Vala,” Netan says, voice low and unmodulated. There’s something terrifying in the way he makes it sound like half request, half prophecy as if daring her to disappoint him.  
  
Vala smiles like the choice to stay had been hers in the first place. “Of course,” she demurs, falling back in line next to Jackson. Tilting her head towards him, her smile doesn’t falter around the words she hisses. “I’m going to kill Jack. This time I mean it.”  
  
Jackson barely acknowledges the death threat, too busy watching Netan like a really fascinating and slightly repulsive puzzle.  
  
“Speak,” Netan says, stepping up behind his desk.  
  
Cam refuses to shift his posture, to relinquish one inch of laconic relaxation despite Netan’s bark. No need to beat around the bush though. “You’ve probably heard tale of it—we’re looking to take out Anubis. Thought you might want in on it.”  
  
“Do I look that foolish to you?”  
  
Of the many words Cam could use to describe Netan, foolish is probably not one of them. And certainly not to his face. Next to him, Vala has gone very still and somehow that just seems more ominous than the fidgeting.  
  
“We’ve found a way to even the odds, so to speak,” Cam says.  
  
For the first time, Netan looks mildly interested. “The drone soldiers?”  
  
Cam smiles. “Not so much a problem for us anymore.”  
  
There is a glimmer of something in Netan’s eyes, greed or possibility, and in a guy like him, both equally frightening. He lowers himself into his seat behind the desk, signaling a shift in the conversation, and Cam’s beginning to suspect that Netan never does anything without premeditation.   
  
“You need ships,” Netan surmises. The Lucian fleet is the only kind of its size in the galaxy. The only fleet with a chance in hell of squaring off against Anubis and not getting swatted down like a bug.  
  
Cam nods. “We need ships.”  
  
Netan settles into a long silence, his fingers steepled in front of him as if he’s mentally running through the variables. That he keeps them standing while he ruminates does not escape Cam’s notice. As the minutes stretch long, he hears Jackson give a nearly inaudible sigh of annoyance at the obvious gambit, but Cam is more interested in the way Vala hasn’t so much as fidgeted a finger as if her very life depends on it.  
  
Cam doesn’t know if this is a test, an abusive demonstration of just who is in the power position in this would-be relationship, or if Netan simply wants the measure of their nerves before he enters an arrangement with them. Cam just watches Vala’s studied stillness and copies it as best he can.  
  
After what feels like an hour but can’t possibly have been more than ten minutes, Netan lifts his chin. “I think we can come to an arrangement.”  
  
Cam relaxes, but next to him, Vala still looks like a rat scrambling to jump a sinking ship.  
  
Rightly so as it turns out, because Netan isn’t quite finished. “Of course, you understand that we will require a demonstration of your ability to neutralize the drone soldiers.”  
  
“A demonstration?” Cam asks. They have purposely limited testing, as Anubis catching on to a sudden decline in his forces would be catastrophic.   
  
“Yes,” Netan says. “One of our outposts fell to Anubis recently. It is held by two drones. It would be an ideal location for a test of your technology.”  
  
More like an ideal place for Netan to reestablish his control over an important outpost at no risk to himself. O’Neill hadn’t been kidding; this guy is a slimy son of a bitch.  
  
Jackson steps forward to intercede. “We have thoroughly tested it. I can assure you it works.”  
  
Netan’s eyes narrow as he regards Jackson like an underling who has spoken out of turn. “If we are going to risk siding against Anubis, do you really think we’re willing to just take your word for it, Tau’ri?”  
  
“Look,” Cam says, stepping in before Jackson’s temper can doom them all. “Anubis can’t know we’re coming. If we start shooting the hell out of his army, he’s going to notice.”  
  
Vala pinches Cam in the side. Hard. “May I speak to you for a moment?” She gives Netan a sweet smile, her head tilting to the side as if to say, ‘What can you do? Silly Tau’ri!’  
  
Netan does not smile back.  
  
The three of them step into the corner and what little privacy it offers. “We can’t do this,” Cam says.  
  
Vala’s voice lowers to a hiss. “Are you insane? We don’t agree to this, we don’t walk out of here alive.” She looks between them. “You understand that, right?”  
  
Before he’d come here, Cam would have said that was just paranoia. Now he’s actually met Netan. He shakes his head. “This is impossible. We’d have to move up the attack.”  
  
“Then do it,” Vala says.  
  
“We can’t just--.”  
  
She pokes him in the arm. “It seems to me your chance of winning this without the Lucian Alliance is about the same as our chance of walking out of here alive if we say no.”  
  
“This isn’t exactly the sort of thing you should rush,” Cam argues. There are plans and plans, years in the making.  
  
“No,” Jackson says, breaking his long silence. “She’s right.”  
  
Vala looks about as surprised to hear it as Cam is. “Excuse me?” he asks.  
  
“Look, the longer we wait the greater the chance of this leaking to Anubis.”  
  
Cam regards Jackson. “And rushing ahead blindly isn’t a bit…reckless?”  
  
He shrugs as if reckless is something he can handle. “The plan has been in place for months. We’ve just been waiting on Rodney.”  
  
“Yeah, but--.”  
  
“But what?” Jackson snaps, cutting across him. “If what we’re really waiting for is some great miracle to save us…well, that’s never going to happen. The Asgard are dead, the Tok’ra and Jaffa only a few steps behind. And we’re next. It’s been _two years_. It’s time for do or die.”  
  
Cam blinks back at Jackson, a little thrown by the ruthless assessment of their situation. But he’s right. They’ve been doing nothing but treading water as Anubis slowly snuffs them out, one base at a time. Omega and a small handful of unfortified outposts are all that’s left of them. If they wait much longer, they won’t have critical mass for their insane Hail Mary plan to even put it in motion, let alone pull it off.  
  
Cam drags a hand over his face. “We need five days. Three at the bare minimum.”  
  
Jackson nods. “Then lets go get Netan’s little outpost back for him.”  
  
Reynolds is going to skin him alive.  
  
* * *  
  
It’s been three days since Sam recklessly stepped on to the _Orfeo_ , locking herself in with Jack. So far they’ve been carefully rotating around each other, alternating time at the controls of the ship.   
  
The long stretches of silence don’t bother her. It’s the way Jack doesn’t seem to mind them that doesn’t seem right. He just appears every eight hours or so, standing next to the chair until she relinquishes the controls. But maybe the most surprising part is that no matter her exhaustion, there is always a part of her that doesn’t want to give up her seat, this sense of…control.  
  
It feels like some long missing part of her coming back to life, a surge of blood to a numbed appendage bringing with it the agonizing protest of oxygen deprived flesh. It hurts, physically seems to burn down the length of her body. It makes everything so much sharper, more in focus than they’ve been for almost as long as she allows herself to remember.  
  
She tries to resent it, to remind herself that this is exactly what she didn’t want, but now that she’s felt the controls under her hands, the hum of the ship, she can’t stand the thought of letting it go again.  
  
Instead she loses herself in the systems, both those vaguely familiar like a half-forgotten childhood story and those new to her, configurations she’s never seen. The ship is a twisted hybrid, a fascinating contradiction. At first she wondered where he found a ship like this, but the longer she worked with it, poked through the systems, the more she recognized the distinctiveness to them. It’s like a fingerprint, unique to one person. She sees his hand in the chaos and simplicity layered uncomfortably together. There are reckless emergency systems that would no doubt pull him out of precipitously dangerous situations, but not without the even higher probability of crash and burn. Do or die. There’s subterfuge here too, cloaks and misdirection and playing possum, all so carefully integrated as to be indistinguishable. Great care and great rashness, all covered with a thin layer of swagger.   
  
She has no idea what is holding it all together.  
  
It frightens her because there’s the distinct possibility that one changed variable will be enough to shatter the entire system, to undo everything.  
  
A panel gives off a series of beeps and Sam’s body is moving well ahead of her mind, easing them out of hyperspace as they approach their destination.   
  
Jack appears within moments, staring out at the planet ahead of them. “Ah, P9R-872,” he says. “I hear it’s lovely this time of year.”   
  
It’s supposed to be a joke, she knows, but like most things these days it doesn’t sit right. She feels the echo of other missions and ancient days when everything had been different but it’s all battling the sharp edge layered just under his voice.   
  
“It might take some time to locate the structure on the surface,” Sam says, doing her part to fall back into routine.   
  
“I’ll start the scans,” he says, dropping into the other seat and punching commands into an auxiliary control panel.  
  
The ability to fall into pattern, a rhythm of actions and unspoken signals without need for words or reminders, is one of the few things they still have. But then are moments like this when one of them does something the other doesn’t expect, a sharp reminder that things are far from normal. She watches his fingers move with ease and practice across complex algorithms and patterns and everything seems to stall out, a hiccup in rhythm throwing everything off-kilter. For a moment, he’s a stranger beneath a collection of foreign clothes and the black tortured lines of his tattoo.   
  
But it’s still easier to bear than those other moments, the times there seems to be no reason at all for the dangerous shift, just some imaginary switch somewhere triggered, Jack’s expression going hard and distant in an instant.   
  
She hears him muttering to himself sometimes, harsh words full of frustration, loathing and exhaustion. She knows that tone, remembers it all too well now from that last day in the forest, his head bowed low over her hands, lips against her knuckles.  
 _  
I’m sorry. I am so damn sorry._  
  
And God, just like that it all comes rushing back, the nausea, the utter helplessness, the smothering numbness. Her fingers dig into her thighs, her breath coming short and fast. Things begin to gray out along the edges.  
  
“Carter?” his voice asks from far away.  
  
She shakes her head. _Breathe, Sam. Breathe_. It will pass. It has to pass.  
  
She forces herself to focus on the display in front of them, the flash of information about the surface of the planet. She lets the data and numbers pull her back in from the ledge, like they have countless times before. Reaching out, she scrolls through the information, looking for patterns, and tries to pretend that her hands aren’t shaking.  
  
She still feels his eyes on her. “Your ship,” she says, trying to shift his focus anywhere else. The one thing she’s remembering about words is that sometimes they’re even easier to hide behind than silence.  
  
His shoulders tense, but his voice is soft, carefully modulated. “What about it?”  
  
“You did all of this yourself.” It’s impressive, but speaks of the hard necessities of his life.  
  
“Who knew old dogs could learn new tricks,” he says and this is familiar—casual dismissal and downplay, tinged with the slightest edge of self-hatred.  
  
She tries to think what she’s learned, but silence doesn’t seem quite the useful skill set it once was.  
  
She turns back to the displays.  
  
“Carter--,” he starts to say, but there’s an insistent beep cutting across him, the ship having found something of interest already.  
  
“Low level power signature in the southern hemisphere,” Sam says, skimming the information.  
  
“So there is,” Jack says, something indefinable in his voice.   
  
She clears her throat. “Shouldn’t we take a closer look?”  
  
He regards her across the cockpit. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”  
  
“Of course,” she says, just a beat too late.  
  
He stares at her long enough to let her know he noticed. “Then I guess you’d better take us down.”  
  
She nods, grateful for the task to focus on. _This is why you're here._  
  
The ship swoops and rattles beneath them as it descends into the atmosphere, and she can't tell anymore if her hands are unsteady or if it’s just the ship fighting against the incessant tug of gravity.  
  
* * *   
  
The flash of light as the rings deposit them in the compound fades and dies, leaving them standing in the dark. Jack flips on his flashlight, sweeping it across the space. He can feel Carter standing just behind him, both of them straining to hear anything.  
  
Long seconds tick by, but there is no sign of life down here. Jack steps cautiously over the edge of the circle and the room floods with warm light.   
  
“Did you do that?” Carter asks.  
  
He can feel the familiar hum in his bones, like his body somehow knows this place, even if his mind doesn’t. “I’m not sure,” he says.   
  
The walls are a smooth, uniform gray, sweeping above their heads in a large dome. He can’t see any source for the light, like the walls themselves are radiating the glow. Along the base of the dome are open doorways at regular intervals.   
  
Carter looks at him as if waiting for him to decide which direction to try first.  
  
He shakes his head. “This is your party, Carter.”  
  
She bites her lip, eyes darting door to door until she settles on one. She steps over the threshold, her flashlight barely penetrating the deep gloom.   
  
Jack follows a few steps behind her, the room lighting itself the moment he walks through the doorway.  
  
Carter glances back over her shoulder at him, but he just shrugs.   
  
This room is far from empty. Floor to ceiling, the place is full of stuff, most of it draped with thin, gauzy cloth, giving it the eerie appearance of a haunted house.   
  
Ahead of him, Carter cautiously pulls a drop cloth off a crate, a small puff of dust rising in the air. Clearly this place has not been touched in ages. Carter absently waves one hand in front of her face, coughing.  
  
“What is it?” Jack asks when all Carter does is stare down at the contents.  
  
“Crystals,” she says, holding a short blue one up for him to see.  
  
“Really?” Had they honestly just stumbled upon an Ancient supply store? It seems too good to be true.  
  
Carter holds the crystal up to the light, frowning at it. Dropping it carelessly back into the crate, she starts pulling drape after drape off, enveloping the room in a cloud of dust.  
  
“Carter,” Jack objects.  
  
“They’re all broken.”  
  
“What?” He peers down into the careful row of boxes, each one containing one color of crystal, like someone sorting their recycling.  
  
She digs her hands into a pile of red crystals, picking up a handful and letting them fall back through her fingers like glittering rubies. “Every single one. Burned out or broken.”  
  
Apparently Daniel had been right, this place is a depository, as in a trash dump.   
  
“Come on,” Carter says, something like excitement underlying her voice. Leave it to Carter to find something worth getting excited over even in a landfill. “Let’s check out some of the other rooms.”  
  
He doesn’t object, following her into the next room and the next. They all have an abandoned air to them, some of them neatly organized like the first, others slightly chaotic as if the inhabitants left in a rush, and everywhere the impenetrable dust of passing time.  
  
He’s lost count of rooms when they finally step into one that is more than simple storage space, instead opening up into a larger area with various machines and diagnostic stations. The walls are lined with consoles and funky looking computers that immediately draw Carter’s attention.   
  
She’s still cautious enough not to start heedlessly poking at the systems, but she’s watching the nonsensical displays with something just bright and familiar enough to be painful to watch.  
  
Jack forces himself to look away from her and that’s when he sees it, half-hidden behind a shelf. He thinks maybe he’s been hearing it this whole time, whispering at the back of his mind. Like it’s just been waiting for him—his answer.  
  
“You know,” he says, slowly making his way across the room. “I think I know an even better way to get rid of Anubis.”  
  
“What?” Carter asks, voice distracted.  
  
Jack shoves the shelf aside, the wall leaping to life as he steps near, pliant metal arms reaching and pulling him close. He thinks there might be a scream from somewhere, the sound of something falling, but the next thing he knows, he’s lying on the floor, Carter leaning over him. Her face is pale and splotchy in places, her hands hovering near his face, but not touching as if she’s scared of the contact.   
  
“Why?” she demands, her voice cracking. “ _Why_ would you do that?”  
  
Maybe because he doesn’t need her permission anymore either.


	4. Greater Than

There were actually four drones holding the outpost, not two, and Daniel wonders if Netan planned on getting them killed as an alternative to joining their dangerous little rebellion. A win-win for him.  
  
“You can’t really be surprised,” Vala says, fingers running through her hair, working at a particularly bad tangle that seems to be her greatest injury from their run-in with the drones.  
  
Daniel watches the industrious work of her hands as she twists her hair back into two tight buns on either side of her head like some bizarro-world version of Princess Leia. You know, if she’d been a thief. A thief with disturbingly accurate shooting skills.   
  
“You mean you suspected Netan would spring something on us like this?” Cam demands, still pretty pissed to find they’ve been thrown to the sharks.  
  
Vala’s hands pause, one eyebrow lifting as she regards Cam like a petulant preschooler from her perch on a rock.  
  
“Right,” Cam says. “If he wasn’t lying or manipulating us, he wouldn’t be Netan.”  
  
Vala grins, something wide and practiced that shows all her teeth. “And they say Tau’ri are dull-witted.”   
  
Cam rolls his eyes, turning his attention to Daniel. “You okay, Jackson?”  
  
Dull pain radiates down Daniel’s left side, but rolling his shoulder he can tell nothing’s broken. He also doesn’t have a giant hole in him from the drone’s weapon, so there’s that. It had been a near thing, he thinks, watching Vala pluck a twig from her jacket with a frown.  
  
She’d hip-checked him out of the way of a blast, slamming him to the ground and for a split moment she’d been laying flat on top of him, looking a little surprised herself. Then she’d reached for his gun, shimmying off him with a lascivious grin. “Sorry, handsome, no time for play.” Popping to her feet, she finished off the third, unexpected drone with aplomb while Cam took care of the fourth.  
  
“I’m fine,” Daniel says. He turns to Vala. “Thank you for that, by the way.”  
  
She brushes a hand down her arm. “Just self-preservation, darling. You were in my way.”  
  
Cam muffles a snicker at the disinterest in her voice, but Daniel doesn’t bother being offended. She is, in many ways, the most convoluted, incomprehensible person he’s ever met.   
  
“What’s her story?” Daniel had once dared to ask Jack, right after Vala delivered their weapons.   
  
Jack had stared after her departing back. “Her own,” he’d tossed back, his normally tight-lipped self, but there’d been something in the way he looked at her, something that took Daniel a while to decipher as camaraderie and reluctant affection.   
  
It wasn’t like Jack to trust easily, now more than ever.  
  
Vala pushes to her feet, gesturing at the drones. “You don’t mind if I collect my fee, do you, boys?”  
  
“Be our guest,” Cam says.  
  
She starts stripping the armor off the first drone with an industry and economy of motion that says she already knows exactly what will earn the highest price on the open market.  
  
“What do we do with her?” Cam asks, his voice lowering.  
  
Daniel crosses his arms over his chest. Vala knows too much to let her walk off now. But the alternative is taking her to Omega, and that is way too much information to put in her hands.  
  
They have two options, really. Lock her up until this is done, or trust her. It’s fairly obvious which is the right answer. He thinks he can see it in her posture that she’s waiting for it, that she can feel it coming, despite how hard she’s trying to look like she’s ignoring them. Maybe she’s already planning her escape route.   
  
It all comes down to why she helped them. The obvious answer is for money, or possibly because Jack asked her and there is a more complicated tangle of debts and history between them than Daniel can even begin to guess at. Neither of those explanations is something they can bank on to keep her loyal, or even at the very least, quiet.  
  
Daniel walks over to her, Cam right on his heels.  
  
Daniel watches her work for a while, but he’s already accepted that she is one puzzle that simple observation will never crack. “Do you care if Anubis is defeated or not?” he asks.  
  
“Sure,” she says, not lifting her eyes from the drones. “Why not.”  
  
She’s not even trying to sound sincere. He crouches down next to her. “I’d seriously just like to know what you think.”  
  
There’s a flash of something flinty and dangerous in her eyes when she looks up at him. She shrugs. “One tyrant’s pretty much the same as the next.”  
  
It seems flippant and disingenuous, but he thinks there is way more honesty layered in there than anything she’s ever said to him before. “Better the devil you know,” he surmises.  
  
“Some might say.” She’s packing away her booty from the fallen drones now, seemingly at ease, but he can feel the tension building in her. He thinks she must be preparing herself for the drop of the other shoe.  
  
“Here’s the thing,” he says. “We’d like your help if you’re willing to give it.”  
  
She takes her time absorbing that, the various items stripped from the drone disappearing into crannies of an outfit that would seem to harbor none.   
  
“And if I’m not?” she eventually asks, her eyes darting to Cam standing over them with his arms crossed. “You going to lock me up?”  
  
“No,” Daniel says without pause, and maybe the answer to this problem is easier than he thought.   
  
He sees Cam’s eyebrows pop up, his mouth opening, but Daniel just firmly shakes his head. He thinks if they don’t give her this choice, then maybe they don’t deserve to take Earth back.  
  
Vala is peering at Daniel. “So you’re saying I can just get up and walk away if I want to. You won’t stop me?”  
  
“We won’t stop you,” Daniel confirms, ignoring Cam’s pointed glare.   
  
She sits back on her heels, looking that strange combination of serene and calculating that is unique to her. “Okay then. What exactly do you boys have in mind?”  
  
* * *  
  
Sam is stuck.   
  
Whatever momentum she may have been riding—curiosity, excitement, delusion—it’s drained away during the silent day and a half spent haunting this dusty, abandoned place. She’s got the push of one nightmare growing behind her, slamming her up against the immovable past that has materialized in front of her.  
  
Faced with the collision, she honestly doesn’t know what else to do than stand in the doorway, her hand latched onto the threshold like a lifeline. She thinks a step in either direction will damn her. Forwards or backwards, it doesn’t matter.  
  
It’s ridiculous and weak, but that doesn’t stop the buzz building in her ears, the way the grey walls are blurring out around her. She doesn’t know how long she stands there, feet immobile, back straight enough to snap, fingers clinging to the architecture like her life depends on it, when his voice finally penetrates the fog.  
  
“Carter,” Jack says, his voice echoing behind her. “I’ve been calling you. Is your radio off?”  
  
She doesn’t turn to look at him, still staring into the room in front of her.   
  
“Carter?” he asks, stepping in next to her. “What’s--.” His eyes follow her gaze, settling on the object in front of her.   
  
She feels his gaze skim her face. “Is that--?”  
  
She nods.  
  
Like everything else here, it’s covered in dust, cracked by age, tools surrounding it like it’s been abandoned mid-diagnostic. It doesn’t look exactly like the Goa’uld version, no gold, no glyphs, just smooth modern lines, but she would recognize it anywhere.   
  
A sarcophagus.  
  
“Why don’t we take a little break,” Jack says, his voice cautious and careful like talking a jumper down from a ledge. She wants to laugh at the backwardness of that. She’s not the one who jumped.  
  
“Back on Cimmeria,” she says, the words slow and almost robotic, but impossible to hold back. “You were so angry at everything. But me…I was just numb.”   
  
He’d been right about her, that heinous thing he accused her of so many years before. _Do you miss it?_ Some sick part of her _had_ missed it, because if he was breaking her bones, or touching her skin…at least she was feeling _something_.  
  
“Carter,” he says, his discomfort with this topic clear. Normally she might care, but everything is different now, different since he stuck his head in the Ancient repository. She feels like she’s being forced to watch him kill himself right in front of her.  
  
He’d just gone back to exploring the compound like nothing happened. She sees it though, the way he’s lighter now, sees it but doesn’t want to believe what it might mean.  
  
She digs the heel of her hand into her sternum, rubbing at the hollow ache there. “I haven’t…felt things since the sarcophagus. Not the way I used to.”  
  
Her eyes run along the lines of the machine, something like longing in her stomach. Sarcophagus—the eater of flesh. She knows why they call it that.  
  
“You still crave it,” he says, awe and horror mingling uneasily in his voice. He’d just thought this was fear, the overwhelming power of memories rushing back holding her here, but the truth is so much worse.  
  
She can’t look at him, can’t look away from the machine. She just feels her eyes brighten with tears and shame as the familiar tug works at her. “Every day,” she confesses.  
  
It would be so easy to just give in, to take the oblivion it offers. He’s done it, why shouldn’t she? She closes her eyes, her body swaying slightly. “Sometimes I think he killed me that day. The day he took the sarcophagus away. Because this isn’t really life.”  
  
“Is that why you came back?”  
  
She thought she came back to prove something, to somehow make up for the guilt building inside her, the thought that maybe, just maybe none of this would have happened if they’d been there. If they’d just gone home.  
  
But maybe her real reason is something else all together.  
  
When Jack left her on Cimmeria, that numbness was all she had. She let five years pass in a haze because she was too terrified to defrost. She doesn’t know if it was fear it would all just hurt too much, or maybe that he had been right…that she wasn’t strong enough to survive this.   
  
She came back because she needs to feel again, even if it’s just pain or disappointment or guilt, because it’s _something_. Because the alternative is letting him win. Again.   
  
“What do you want to do?” he asks.  
  
She wants to climb inside and never come back out. Wants to let that light wash away the gnawing ache in her chest, dull the fact that she’s watching Jack die in slow motion. Again. She wants to make the memories fade to nothing but indistinct phantoms that will never be able to touch her ever again.  
  
She wants to forget. God, more than anything she just wants to forget. Climbing inside would be so easy.  
  
She hears the rip of velcro, tearing her eyes away just long enough to see Jack pull a block of explosive out of a small pack.   
  
It’s the only answer. She knows this. Destroy it or let it destroy her. But getting close enough to it to do it, she doesn’t think she’d pass that test. “I don’t think…” She shakes her head. “I can’t.”  
  
He does it for her, putting the small charge inside the machine against the smooth white walls, and she feels panic rising in her throat. She can’t let him--. God, no. She takes a step to stop him, only her fingers’ unrelenting grip on the doorway keeping her in place.  
  
He doesn’t destroy it though, instead returning to her side, holding out the detonator to her. She understands. He won’t do this for her.  
  
“Take it, Carter,” he says, his voice soft, but insistent.   
  
This is why you really came, she reminds herself. Because she had to see, see if she’d crumble into nothing the first time something challenged her. She _yearned_ for it, this chance to really test herself. She tries not to wonder what it means that of everyone, he was the only one to see it, the only one not focused on packing her away in yet more cotton. She’d been drowning, and he’d seen it when no one else had.  
  
But God, she thinks, fighting to get her pulse under control, feeling a trickle of cold sweat work its way down the back of her neck. This might just be worse.  
  
He’s standing close now, too close. She feels him slip the detonator into the palm of her free hand. Her fingers curl around it and just holding it makes her want to vomit.  
  
She shakes her head. “I can’t--.”  
  
“Carter,” he interrupts, something in his voice finally forcing her eyes up and away from the machine. She wonders how he can look so calm when everything is going to hell around them. “You’re one of the strongest people I’ve ever known.”  
 _  
He doubts you are strong enough to survive.  
_  
It’s a lie. The way he’s looking at her tells her that.   
  
Keeping her eyes locked on his, she takes a deep breath and pushes the button.   
  
She feels the small blast like a blow to the chest, the impact of the knowledge of what she’s just done, what she’s given up almost felling her. His gaze is the only thing keeping her upright.  
  
“You did it,” he says, pride and awe all bundled up with every other dangerous feeling tangled between them.  
  
She pulls her eyes away from him, staring instead at the charred remains. She feels the pain echoing through her body, the ache of her fingers as they grip the jamb. _Feels_ it.   
  
She lets go.   
  
She doesn’t fall down.  
  
* * *  
  
“Let me get this straight,” Reynolds says. “You took out four drones in front of a multitude of witnesses to keep Netan from having you killed, showing our hand and forcing us to move up the timeline of our attack to mere days, and on top of this, you’ve brought Vala Mal Doran back to our last, top secret outpost, a woman who would as soon rob us blind as give us a straight answer?”  
  
Daniel wonders if he should point out that Netan has also proven himself to be an ally they can’t trust, but Reynolds is looking irate enough. “Sounds about right,” he says instead.  
  
“We also got Netan to pledge his ships,” Cam points out in a misguided attempt to find the silver lining.  
  
Reynolds doesn’t even dignify that with a response, dragging a hand over his face.   
  
To be honest, Daniel doesn’t think Reynolds is really all that pissed. He thinks he’s relieved to have the decision out of his hands.  
  
Reynolds looks over at Teal’c, maybe to gauge his reaction to this new development.  
  
Teal’c’s eyes dart to Daniel’s and he sees the same understanding there. This is a push they needed. “It would seem it is time to contact our allies,” Teal’c says.  
  
“Shouldn’t we call back Sam?” Rodney interjects.  
  
“I do not believe that will be necessary,” Teal’c says before Daniel can even decipher the denial rising in his throat at Rodney’s suggestion.  
  
Daniel nods, a beat of understanding between them as Daniel backs Teal’c up. “Who knows, they may find something important there.”  
  
It’s just an excuse not to involve them though. Teal’c knows this as well as Daniel. They don’t need one more ship so badly that they have to pull them back. They’ve already given enough. If the worst happens, at least they will be safe.  
  
Daniel thinks he may finally get it, why Jacob lied to them all for so long.  
  
“And the Lucian?” Reynolds prompts.  
  
Cam nods, acknowledging that they’ve solved one problem only through the introduction of a new one. “That’s just something we’ll have to worry about later.”   
  
“If we live,” Daniel tacks on.  
  
“Always such the bottle of sunshine,” Rodney complains.  
  
“So. Three days?” Cam asks, all of them turning to Reynolds for the final say.  
  
Reynolds blows out a breath, pushing off the edge of his desk. “Three days,” he confirms, nothing but unbending certainty left in his voice.  
  
No more waiting.  
  
* * *  
  
Jack’s had a string of words echoing in his mind for a while now. He thinks it might be the name of this place.  
 _  
Cum tacent clamant._  
  
He wanders the halls with the words pinging against his skull, his feet following a pattern indiscernible to him. Not that he tries too hard to figure it out either. For once he’s happy to let the noise unraveling in his mind take him wherever it wants.   
  
It’s a lot more interesting this time, now that he knows what’s happening and doesn’t particularly care where it leads.   
  
Sometimes he thinks he sees a shadow of movement out of the corner of his eye. Whenever he turns to get a better look, it disappears like a glimmer, a hallucination not meant to be seen straight on. So he stops trying. He lets it hover, following the specter from room to room, down hallway after hallway just to see where it leads.  
  
This is how he finds the room.  
  
It’s empty, the walls the same flat grey as the rest of the compound. Overhead though, is a high domed ceiling that disappears into the shadows. As Jack steps inside, the darkness lingers.  
  
He almost trips over the small pedestal in the middle of the room, his hand slapping down on top of it to keep his balance. The metal hums to life under his palm, pinpricks of light appearing in the air above him.  
  
They rotate slowly, and Jack knows what this place is: a map of the galaxy. His eyes graze familiar locations and formations. It seems to respond to his thoughts, flawlessly zooming in on Earth’s location, the planet growing large in the center of the room. It looks so tranquil hanging there, and he feels an unexpected ache for a world he’d thought he was fine leaving behind a hell of a long time before.  
  
He reaches up a hand to touch the light, the room spinning unexpectedly as he does, voices and images flying past too fast to comprehend, building like a cacophony in his mind. He feels his knees hit the floor as his body buckles under the pressure.  
  
 _Why chase them…thought you might want in...it’s time for do or die…no time for play...three days…three days…  
  
They will come to me.  
_  
Jack slaps his hands to his ears in a vain attempt to silence the noise, the tension building in his head. It’s threatening to split everything wide open when he sees her. A woman stands calmly on the other side of the space, staring down at him. She seems to have bled out of the very walls themselves, like maybe she’s always been here, her robes the same nondescript gray as the space around her.  
  
She takes one earnest step toward him, her face a mask of concern and fear. She doesn’t speak, but he hears the words echoing in his mind as if she’s shouted them.   
_  
Alea iacta est._  
  
He doesn’t understand.  
  
Her eyes flick upwards. He looks up at Earth calmly hovering above them and without warning it shatters in a ball of fiery light that burns into his retinas, lingering long after the light fades into nothing but dust trailing to the floor in the inky blackness.   
  
“I don’t understand,” Jack manages to squeeze out of his throat.  
  
The faded light still seems to burn brightly in the eyes of the silent woman. Behind her Jack can just make out the movement of more figures fanning out behind her like a shimmering wave. She takes one stumbling step back, fading into the shadows.  
  
“Wait!”  
  
“Jack?” Carter asks from behind him.  
  
With her voice, the room shifts, once more empty and calm, the stars rotating quietly in the heavens. Jack is still standing on his feet, one hand pressed to the pedestal. Like none of it ever happened.  
  
Only it did. And now it’s there, perfectly formed in his mind, bright and whole and simple like someone has reached in and planted it in his brain.  
  
 _Alea iacta est._  
  
He knows then, knows they can’t win. They have no idea what they are walking into.   
  
He turns to Carter. “We have to go back to Earth.”  
  
Her eyes lift to the tiny worlds floating behind him, her jaw tightening. “Yeah,” she agrees, like maybe they’ve always been building towards this.  
  
It’s well past time to go home.


	5. All We Are

Sam shoves a box against the far wall of the Orfeo’s cargo hold, not bothering to try to make sense of the jumble of objects tucked inside it.   
  
She has a careful litany of stages repeating in her mind, constantly tracking Jack’s slow degradation as the Ancient knowledge unspools in his mind. He’s slipped once or twice already, foreign words seeping into his vocabulary, but only when he’s distracted or exhausted.  
  
Three or four days more, she calculates.  
  
The most telling milestone is the fact that he’s moved into the mad packing phase. He’s filling box after box with objects from the compound, muttering that they will be important. She doesn’t bother to ask why, not wanting to see the frustrated tic of his hands as he tries to latch on to anything concrete. She thinks he doesn’t even really know what or why he’s doing anything anymore.   
  
Something happened to him in the observatory, turning his apathetic listlessness into a whirlwind of movement. She’s not sure which phase is worse because maybe he’s not disappearing anymore, but that just means that he’s burning out faster.   
  
With a sigh, Sam lifts another box to the towering collection and tries to focus her mind on the developing game of tetris that is his cargo hold, and not his crumbling mind. He’s gathered enough stuff to take with them to stretch his ship to the limits, even counting the rather cleverly concealed compartments that she can only assume he uses for smuggling.  
  
She’s moving some cargo around, trying to consolidate to make room, when she pulls the top off a large crate in the corner that seems strangely isolated from all the others. A flash of color catches her eye, and staring down at the contents, she tries to reconcile what she’s seeing but it just doesn’t add up. There are layers of fabric and boxes of foodstuff she recognizes far too well from the supplies her father brought to her like clockwork over the years.   
  
What are they doing on Jack’s ship?  
  
Reaching in, she pulls out a glass jar of preserves, the label carefully handwritten.  
  
Her favorite.   
  
She’d been willing to see the quilt on Jack’s bunk as an aberration, something her father had passed on, but in light of the crate open in front of her she’s finally realizing it is so much more.  
  
She carefully secures the lid back in place.  
  
* * *  
  
“Jack?” Sam asks, wandering into the room furthest back in the compound. “I’ve loaded everything on your list.”  
  
He doesn’t acknowledge her, intent on a bag he’s packing. For a panicked moment she wonders if it’s already begun, if his mind is already slipping away. She takes a step closer to him. “Jack?”  
  
“When did I become Jack?”  
  
Her heart stutters in her chest and she doesn’t know if it’s because she’s relieved he can still speak or terror at his words. “What?”  
  
For a moment she thinks— _prays_ —he’s going to take the question back, to shrug it off, but then he turns, nothing uncertain in his gaze. “When did you start calling me Jack?”  
  
He’s staring back at her and she knows she should turn around and not have this conversation, but he’s got a ticking time bomb in his head and her feet just won’t move. She wants to hate him in that moment because he’s heading for the grave and somehow seems to think that gives him the right to ask these questions, to rip things open on his way out.  
  
He doesn’t have the right.  
  
But then she thinks of a carefully packed crate, years of watching and caring from afar, what that must have cost him.  
  
This is it. No more chances.   
  
“The day…” She breaks off, flinching as her voice cracks over the word.  
  
“Right,” he says, his voice going flat. He turns back to the panel in front of him. “Of course.”  
  
She knows what he’s thinking, but he’s wrong.  
  
She debates letting him keep thinking it was the day Anhur switched tactics, that first time, a first time neither of them can get back, but for her, of all the traumas that is not the one her mind lingers on, the one that she can’t scrape away no matter how hard she tries. She’d already been so far gone by then, after he took away the sarcophagus.   
  
She wonders if the truth is worse.  
  
“No,” she says. “It was before that.”  
  
He became Jack the day she stopped thinking of him as the Colonel. The day she stopped following his orders, spoken or unspoken. The day she broke that bond.  
  
She swallows hard, willing the foreign press of tears to leave her be, for the power of the memory to keep its distance. None of that has worked for weeks now and she almost wishes for silence again if it wouldn’t be such a capitulation.  
  
“The knife,” she forces herself to say and she can almost feel the breaks in her bones, the stickiness of blood on her skin.   
  
She should have killed him. He wanted it. She knew that, despite his inability to speak. She _knew_ it.   
  
He did it for her once, killing her rather than leaving her captive to something, but she just couldn’t do it. She thinks if he’d been just her CO, if it was just about Colonel O’Neill…she thinks she could have done it. But Jack…not Jack. And that’s what is unforgivable.  
  
He has his back to her, his spine stiff and his fingers motionless on the pack in front of him. “Okay,” is his only response.  
  
She doesn’t know what that means.  
  
Opening a small hatch in front of him, he exposes a giant orange-colored cylinder that looks like it’s made of stained glass. He clicks on his flashlight, and Sam follows suit. He pulls the cylinder free with a swift twist and a tug, the compound shuddering into darkness around them.  
  
“We’re going to need this,” he says.  
  
She believes him.  
  
* * *  
  
 _She’s limp against the chains, shoulder dislocated, jaw angled unnaturally under the blooming bruises, chest completely still.  
  
Jack wants to close his eyes, but has no control. The thing wants him to watch. Always watching.  
  
Even Jack isn’t ready for her sudden resurgence from death and he’s never been more in awe of her. Not even death can stop her. The blade she wields is cool and sharp against his neck and if he could, he would weep in gratitude. She will end this.  
  
But there’s something in her face. Hesitation. And a flicker of something even worse, because the snake sees it too.  
  
“Do it!” he screams wordlessly.  
  
But she can’t hear and he sees the moment her resolve falters, the instant she cracks.  
  
He hears her soft apology and knows she says it both for leaving him captive and for what the snake will force him to do to her in retaliation. Already it is feeding him images, ideas it has for her.  
  
Nausea roils around his phantom stomach. He tries not to look, not to feel her blood flowing over his hands.  
  
Part of him hates her for her weakness._  
  
Jack jerks awake, suffering a moment of disorientation as he absorbs the small alcove around him, the familiar hum of his ship at full speed.  
  
Right, he thinks, his head dropping back to his thin pillow. They are racing towards Earth, chasing an event Jack can’t put in words, outrunning the ticking time bomb in his brain.  
  
There aren’t any Asgard left. Who’s supposed to save him?  
  
He’s going to die. He knows this.  
  
There aren’t a lot of regrets anymore, just the surety that this, finally, is the right path. But there’s one last thing to do before his words disappear all together.  
  
Pushing out of bed, he moves towards the front of the ship.  
  
Carter is at the controls.  
  
Her transformation this last week has been startling. Not that he would have expected any less from the Carter he’d known. Only she’s not the woman she once was. She probably never will be, but she’s solid and focused and stubborn enough not to back down from conversations she would probably rather never have.   
  
She doesn’t need him or anyone looking out for her anymore. It makes leaving a lot easier. He just doesn’t want to leave her clinging to a burden that never existed in the first place.  
  
“He had a sarcophagus,” he says.  
  
Carter jumps at the unexpected voice as much as the words, he thinks. “What?” she asks, not looking back, hands tight on the controls.  
  
There’s no time for pulling punches. “Anhur.”  
  
She winces at the name. “I know,” she snaps, and he imagines she’s thinking about it again, the white light, the hum, the blissful blankness. She knows better than anyone that Anhur had a sarcophagus, but she’s still not getting it, not making the connection that the Carter she used to be would have already seen long before.  
  
He waits patiently for her to look at him. When she finally manages to lift her gaze to his, he stares back at her, willing her to understand.  
  
“He had a sarcophagus,” he repeats, each word carefully enunciated.  
  
It finally seems to slam into her, her face paling and her breath catching. “He had a sarcophagus,” she repeats.   
  
He wouldn’t have stayed dead, even if she’d managed it.  
  
She seems to fold inward, the tension leaving her spine. Her empty hands tremble in her lap as she stares down at them, and Jack sees the tears that struggle free splashing on her open palms.  
  
For five years of built up silence and anger and guilt, she falls apart so quietly. A few tears and a bowed back, her hair falling forward over her face. It makes it all so much more painful to watch.  
  
He hesitates, always hesitating, but finally gets his feet to move, crossing the space. Maybe this was just an inevitable conversation, or maybe it’s the knowledge of time running out on all of this, but he gently turns the chair until she’s facing him and crouches down in front of her. He reaches out to touch her face, slow enough for her to pull away, to object, but all she does is carefully track the movement.   
  
He finally makes contact, his thumb brushing away the tears, and she doesn’t flinch or pull back, her hands open and still on her lap.  
  
She closes her eyes briefly and then she’s looking at him, and he can’t believe what he’s seeing, some tiny, slender thread of that dangerous truth still in her eyes.  
  
“How can you do that?” he asks, his voice hoarse.   
  
“What?”  
  
“Look at me and not see him.”  
  
“Jack,” she says, her face crumpling. “You know why I couldn’t do it. You _know_.”  
  
They stare at each other and Jack still has the memory fresh in his mind, that tiny moment that betrayed them both to Anhur, doomed them to torture even more insidious. But what he can’t remember anymore are the rationalizations they’d used, the excuses for staying on the same team, despite the truth they could no longer ignore. Had he really thought it wouldn’t matter? Denial and repression hadn’t saved them.  
  
He pulls his hand back. “It was my fault,” he says. “All of it.”  
  
“No,” she denies.  
  
“I was your commander.”  
  
She shakes her head. “It was my choice too. I knew the risks.”  
  
His jaw tightens. None of that changes the most damning fact of all. “I wanted you and he knew it.”  
  
She flinches, the gesture involuntary, but bone deep. “It’s not the same,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper.  
  
“If I hadn’t--.”  
  
“No,” she interrupts, refusing to back down on this one thing. “He was a Goa’uld. He would have hurt us either way.”   
  
Jack pushes to his feet, taking a few agitated steps away from her.  
  
From the first moments of blending, Anhur had been convinced Jack was fighting him, blocking him somehow. That was power Jack never had. It was only ever Anhur’s weakness working against him, his inability to make sense of Jack’s knowledge, to make use of it. That’s what the endless routine of her death had been about—punishment, an attempt to break the host, to make it all make _sense_. At least until the snake’s twisted mind became obsessed with something else all together.   
  
Anhur hadn’t really seen Carter before the day she dared lift a knife against him. She—a mostly dead female slave, the least important being of all—daring to threaten the life of her god. It shook Anhur, splitting everything open, this bond the humans had that he could never understand. From then on, she was _all_ he saw.   
  
Scared, scared little god, just scrambling to stay alive, getting lost in his own sick games.  
  
Jack swallows hard against the bitterness rising in his throat. “Or maybe he would have just killed you, if he didn’t think there was something worth keeping you alive for.”   
  
Carter’s voice is small when she finally speaks. “Would that have been better? Would you rather I was dead?”  
  
He still has it all fresh in his mind, every heinous detail. He turns to look at her. “Rather than what he made me do to you? _Yes_.”  
  
She doesn’t flinch back from the vehemence in his voice, rather holding her ground, her back straightening. “Is that why you did it?” she asks. “Why you stuck your head in that thing?”  
  
He stares back at her, feeling like he’s watching a train wreck in progress, but unable to look away. “What?”  
  
She licks her lips, forcing out the one question they’ve been dancing around since this all began. “Because you would rather be dead?”  
  
He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t think she really needs him to. She stares back at him as if willing him to deny it. He can see the terrible realization building in her face as the silence stretches long between them.   
  
She understands now. Finally.   
  
It’s never been about the knife. It’s always been Cimmeria.  
  
Always Cimmeria.  
  
For a moment he thinks she’s going to fall apart under the weight of this realization, but then he watches the stunned horror wipe from her face in the span of a moment, everything shutting off. She’s blank again. So painfully blank.   
  
“Okay,” she says, something like a promise. She pushes to her feet, and when he looks, her hands are steady. “Okay. That’s all I needed to know.”  
  
She walks away.  
  
 _Finally_.


	6. Prelude

At the Omega Site, the walls hum and whisper.  
  
Vala lies in her room that isn’t quite a prison cell—yet only all the more dangerous for it—and listens. She prefers the walls that are easily seen and worked around to the ones secretly woven and set in words and expectations. The open doorway seems to ask for trust, and it’s always the ones who feel the need to ask who deserve it the least.  
  
Or possibly the Tau’ri simply believe they have the upper hand.  
  
Either way, it makes them fools. That’s comforting in a way the open doorway is not.  
  
After all, only fools would adopt alien technology without truly understanding it. She supposes on the surface the integration of multiple alien technologies at the Omega site is a visual reminder of their alliances, the forces they will attempt to bring to bear against Anubis. But for all their egalitarian idealism, the Tau’ri haven’t taken the time to know their allies as well as their enemies. Trust may just be their ultimate downfall. Poetic, but inevitable.  
  
Take the Tok’ra, for example. The very species to provide the crystal structure used for the basis of this compound. They are an arrogant race uncaring, or simply incapable, of understanding the basic premise of privacy. For a race seeped in subterfuge, they understand nothing of secrets among their own kind.  
  
So it is that these pretty crystal walls contain a certain useful property the Tok’ra would never think to identify as a flaw. But it _is_ a weakness, this crystalline structure that builds and compounds upon natural veins of various densities. One that with the right equipment, some patience, and a little privacy, can turn the walls themselves into a surveillance system, carrying sound great distances.   
  
Vala has all of these things in abundance.  
  
And so she sleeps with the walls whispering in her ear, the Tau’ri secrets—mundane and otherwise—trickling into her mind syllable by syllable. She has always believed the true nature of a race is to be found not in their actions or intentions, but in their lies—the secrets they keep. The Tau’ri are open before her.  
  
“Take Vala with you.”  
  
Her eyes snap open, Colonel Reynolds’s voice vibrating against her eardrum, raising above all the other chatter. She adjusts the control the barest amount, zeroing in on the conversation.  
  
“What?” Daniel’s voice this time, sharp with confusion and annoyance.  
  
“I want someone to have an eye on her at all times. She knows way too much.”   
  
They have no idea, she thinks, pulling the bud from her ear with a yank.  
  
It’s not quite a prison door finally appearing, but the first creaking approach nonetheless. That’s okay. She’s prepared for this, already has five paths out of this convoluted base worked out. All she’s waiting for is the excuse.   
  
When Daniel finally appears twenty minutes later, he’s still looking harried and annoyed. But certain. Ruthlessly so. Always so sure of the path he set them on that day in Netan’s chamber. She doesn’t know yet if this is delusion in the name of self-preservation or actual belief. She doubts she’ll have the chance to find out either way.  
  
“They want you to stay with me for the duration of the fight,” he explains without preamble.  
  
Vala swings up to a seated position, wondering if he’ll notice that for all intents and purposes her bags are already packed. “Why?” she asks.  
  
His eyebrows scrunch over the top of his glasses. “So I can keep an eye on you.”  
  
She rolls his honesty around on her tongue, trying to taste the hidden barbs. “They don’t trust me.”  
  
“No,” he admits, no apology in sight.  
  
She reminds herself that honesty isn’t everything. It probably just means he doesn’t think she’s important enough to lie to. She swings her feet back and forth over the edge of the bed, working variables, but really waiting for that click. That tickle at the back of her brain that has kept her alive this long.  
  
Daniel’s staring at her as if tensing for a fight.  
  
She isn’t quite ready to give him one, she decides. “Fair enough,” she says, gestures carefully careless, spine fluid as she hops to her feet.  
  
His shoulders relax. His mistake.  
  
She grabs her bag and slips out into the hall with him, eying the people rushing back and forth. The Tau’ri plan put in motion.   
  
They pass by one of her exit paths on the way, and she reminds herself that once they are away from the Omega Site, it may only become more difficult to slip away. Her steps slow. She reaches for the wall, her fingers sliding over the crystal, feeling the hum build and change as people shuffle from space to space.   
  
Daniel pauses, looking back at her. “Are you coming?”  
  
She glances at his face, the position of his hands, studying the angle of his spine as he stands there. Strolling past her exit, she takes his arm. “Where to, handsome?”  
  
He sighs, shrugging off her arm and aiming them towards the hangars.  
  
She’ll take the Tau’ri’s open doors for now, let them think it means something. All she really needs are their walls.  
  
Their idealism will take care of the rest.  
  
* * *  
  
Cam flattens himself against the wall, narrowly avoiding getting run over by a cart stacked with crates careening down around the corner.   
  
“Whoa there,” he chastises the out of breath young man behind the wheel. Kicking Anubis’ ass is going to be tricky enough without maiming each other during the prep phase. “Slow down.”  
  
“I’m sorry, sir,” the kid says, face flushed red under the beads of sweat. “Dr. McKay said these crates needed to get to the gate ASAP and if they were late, I could deal with Teal’c’s…displeasure.” He goes a bit pale at the thought, and Cam doesn’t entirely blame him.  
  
He waves him on, making a mental note to remind McKay not to mess with the assistants’ heads. “Just try not to kill anyone, okay?”  
  
“Sure thing!” the kid calls back over his shoulder as he disappears down the hall with absolutely no less velocity than before.  
  
Cam shakes his head and crosses over to McKay’s office, banging his fist on the door. “Hop to it, McKay. Project Santa Claus is a go.”  
  
McKay looks up from his desk, giving him a harried look. “I can’t believe Reynolds let you give the mission such a ridiculous name.”  
  
Cam shrugs, not really feeling the need to have this argument yet again. “Come on. We’ve got a few chimneys to hit before the big day.”  
  
“ _Chimneys to hit_?” McKay sputters, looking like his head is going to implode with righteous indignation. His hands get all flappy, and that’s just never a good thing. “We’re talking about beaming cargo onto an _occupied_ world from a _cloaked_ ship without being detected or blown up! It’s nearly impossible!”  
  
Cam blinks calmly back at him. “And you think getting little Betty Sue’s pony down a chimney was easy?”  
  
That manages to temporarily stun McKay into silence, and Cam mentally tallies a point in his column. As usual though, McKay doesn’t stay silent for long.  
  
“You are completely bent, you know that?” he says. “I don’t even know why I bother trying anymore.”  
  
“Because you’re a misunderstood genius and that’s your lot in life,” Cam says. “Now grab your stuff and let’s go.”  
  
McKay continues to grumble to himself as he darts around the room, packing up his necessary equipment. Of course, McKay’s definition of the word necessary has always been unique.  
  
“That’s it!” Cam says after ten minutes of watching him stockpile everything he owns. “We are out of here _now_.”  
  
Physically steering McKay out into the hall, Cam takes the precaution of looking both ways. These days you can never be too careful.  
  
“I thought we were in a hurry?” McKay snipes.  
  
Cam ignores him, stepping out into traffic and making a beeline for the hangars. They’re maybe halfway there when someone calls out his name.  
  
“Colonel Mitchell!”  
  
Cam twists around to locate the source, spying Kate Ortiz working her way across the hall.   
  
“Kate,” he says, giving her a smile. He glances at the small pack over her shoulder, sparing a moment to compare it to the fifty-ton steamer truck currently threatening to break McKay in half. “You heading out?”  
  
She nods. “I’m with the Valedian fleet.”  
  
“Ah,” he says, shifting slightly when she gives him an expectant look, like waiting to hear where he’s being deployed. “I’m…somewhere else.”  
  
Her eyes sparkle with humor. “Top secret mission,” she says, tapping the side of her nose. “Gotcha.”  
  
He grins. “Something like that.”  
  
“Well, in that case, I guess I’ll see you on Earth,” she says, holding out her hand.  
  
He takes her hand, giving her a crooked grin. “It’s a date.”  
  
Her eyebrow pops up, and Cam feels his face flush. “What I meant, of course--.”  
  
Kate tugs on his hand, lifting up to press a kiss to his cheek. “Just when I thought you’d never ask.”  
  
“Really?” he asks, only belatedly realizing that sounding that incredulous probably dents his cool just a little.   
  
Her smile softens, something sobering in the look she gives him. “Good luck, Cam.”  
  
He squeezes her fingers. “You too.”  
  
She steps away then, glancing at McKay and giving him a nod as if she is not even remotely bothered that he has been standing there avidly watching them. “Doctor McKay.”  
  
McKay stares after her as she walks away, his mouth hanging open.  
  
“Not a word, McKay,” Cam grumbles. “Not a word.”  
  
McKay hikes his pack up with a grunt. “You mean like ‘cute’? Or maybe just ‘pathetic’?”  
  
Cam plants a hand in the middle of his pack, pushing him down the hallway. “Move it, Rudolph.”  
  
“Oh, for God’s sake.”  
  
* * *  
  
There’s something hard in Vala’s eyes as she surveys the planet they’ve just landed on. “Who are we meeting again?” she asks, her voice casual as if she’s simply forgotten the information, and not that he’s never told her.   
  
“We’re meeting up with the infiltration strike force,” Daniel says again, still sidestepping the simple inquiry. He doesn’t really know why he’s being so obscure, other than the way a little wrinkle of a frown appears between her eyes every time he does it. It’s only fair that she get to be the uncomfortable one every once and a while.   
  
She makes a small sound of annoyance, and Daniel smiles to himself. Glancing around, he’s surprised that none of the Tok’ra are here to meet them, just three cargo ships sitting in the sun. Hell, he thought _someone_ would bother to come up. He wanders towards a small strand of trees, trying to remember exactly where the rings are.   
  
“There,” Vala says, pointing off to the right.   
  
He looks at her in surprise, but she’s already turned away, walking unerringly to a small break in the bushes that looks familiar. Crossing over to stand next to her, he asks, “How did you know--?”  
  
She tugs him closer as the rings sweep up and around them, slamming his body up against hers, but also keeping his heel from getting clipped.   
  
“Thanks,” he mutters, stepping quickly back away.   
  
She gives him a toothy smile, one she probably uses to get whatever she wants out of people. “I’ll just add it to the list.”  
  
Daniel frowns. He has zero doubt that she’s keeping one; he just doesn’t want to contemplate what the final payment may be.  
  
“Uh, hello,” a familiar voice says, and it’s only then that Daniel that they’ve been deposited in the underground cave. Jacob and a dozen other Tok’ra are standing in a circle a short distance away. Something about the positioning and the atmosphere of the room tells Daniel they have stumbled into the middle of a ceremony of some kind.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says. “We didn’t mean to interrupt.”  
  
Jacob waves away the apology, the group breaking up. “We were done.”  
  
Daniel waits while Jacob speaks quietly to a few Tok’ra before crossing over to greet them.   
  
“Hey, Jacob,” Daniel says, gesturing to Vala. “Do you know Vala Mal Doran?” As a friend of Jack’s, Daniel doesn’t know how much experience she’s had with the Tok’ra.  
  
The slight widening of Jacob’s eyes clues Daniel in that an introduction may not have been necessary. In an instant he can see that there’s a history here way beyond Jack. One he’s clearly missing big pieces to, but he can see it, the way Vala doesn’t back down, her gaze steady, even as Jacob’s eyes slide over and around and through her, never quite touching.  
  
Guilt. The universal language.  
  
“Oh,” Vala says with a careless wave. “The Tok’ra and I are old friends.”  
  
Daniel doesn’t miss Jacob’s wince.  
  
He’d love to ask exactly what this is all about, but one of the Tok’ra reappears at Jacob’s side.  
  
“It is done, Selmak,” she says, bowing her head.  
  
“Good,” Selmak replies. “Head to the surface with the others.”  
  
Now Daniel can hear the telltale liquid hum echoing down the tunnel. Turning, he can see the light of the next hallway collapsing.   
  
“You’re destroying the base?” Daniel asks, surprised.  
  
Jacob turns back to watch the tunnel collapse in liquid light. “One way or another, we’re closing up shop.”  
  
Anubis has undermined their very purpose, erased patterns and hierarchies they have depended upon for centuries, just as he’d done to the Jaffa. If there are no more Goa’uld, in the service of Anubis or otherwise, they have nothing to masquerade as, nothing to mimic. They have tried to shift to smugglers and information gatherers, but it’s always had the feeling of a stopgap measure, not a role that actually fit.  
  
The time of the Tok’ra is near an end.  
  
Vala’s eyes bore into Jacob’s back, but Daniel can’t quite read her expression. Not satisfaction so much as…grim understanding?  
  
She turns, catching Daniel watching her. She lifts one eyebrow as if to say, ‘Are we going to stand around here all day or what?’  
  
She’s right. They need to leave now if they are going to make the rendezvous in time. They don’t have time for puzzles and unspoken mysteries. Not even a moment to spare to grapple with the precarious future of the Tok’ra.   
  
“Jacob,” Daniel says, touching his arm.   
  
Jacob recovers, tearing his eyes away from the display. “Right. Of course,” he says. “We’re ready.”  
  
* * *  
  
Teal’c stands on a low rise, supervising the delivery of cargo from the Omega Site to Hak’tyl. He had thought the sheer number of weapons provided for his strike force was overly ambitious, knowing the number of able-bodied Jaffa to be depleted to practically nothing.   
  
But the valley below is dotted with a great many tents, dozens of figures moving closer to help distribute the supplies, to hear the details of the battle plan.   
  
Teal’c mentally tallies the warriors, noting class and caste, the symbols on their foreheads. It’s a tiny glimmer of what he had always hoped for—horus guard next to serpent, symbols mixing and blurring and lines no longer so clearly drawn. They are Jaffa, not enemy soldiers. And moving between them with confidence and ease, the Hak’tyl women, geared for battle.   
  
The last great Jaffa army.  
  
Ishta appears by his side, following the line of his gaze.  
  
“I did not expect so many,” he confesses.  
  
“They do not fight for Earth,” she says, her voice soft. There is no heat in the words, no callous disregard for the suffering of the Tau’ri, but rather a careful truth. When the call came, it was not the fate of Earth that drew them. They do not fight for territory, they do not fight for lords, they fight for nothing less than their very existence, their way of life.   
  
They travel to Earth together, perhaps to the end of their kind. But perhaps a foundation too.   
  
This march is all they have left.  
  
“Come,” Ishta says, drawing him away back towards the gate.  
  
Sergeant Lee meets them at the platform. “This is the last of them,” he says, gesturing at a pile of long, thin crates.  
  
Ishta touches the top crate. “Are these the items I requested from Dr. McKay?”  
  
“Yes, Ma’am,” Lee confirms.  
  
Teal’c watches with interest as she opens the crate, not knowing what request she has made of Rodney McKay. She pulls out a staff weapon, and it is only after a moment of inspection that he realizes it has been modified to fire the drone pulse.  
  
Ishta turns to him, holding the staff out in offering. “It is time you carried your staff once more, Jaffa.”  
  
Teal’c swallows, feeling pressure crawling up his throat. He curls his fingers around the cool metal, feels the weight pull and tug at his shoulders.  
  
“I thank you,” he says, words hoarse with the weight of nostalgia, of _rightness_.  
  
She nods. “Welcome home.”  
  
* * *  
  
Jack hunches over a worn piece of paper, the hum of the ship quiet under his body.  
  
The last day has been about pen and paper and draining important thoughts out before they disappear. There’s no English left, just the tick of the pen in short lines and dots that Jack can only hope will make more sense to Daniel than they do to him. It’s important.  
  
There’s always been something more to Anubis. Even Anhur, as useless as he was, was enough to confirm this. And now with the Ancient knowledge unspooling…it’s there, just right out of reach.  
  
His pen continues to tick along.  
  
It means something. _Something_.  
  
His fist hits his thigh in frustration.  
  
“Jack,” Carter says, voice cautious.   
  
She’s never far now, eyes following him (no longer filled with anger or accusation or even sadness, but back-breaking _resolve_ ), tracking his each and every slip, never quite able to hide a flinch every time a foreign word escapes. It was a relief when the chaos in his mind finally swallowed his ability to speak all together. Words have never done anything but trip them up.   
  
He can hear it sometimes, the echoes of a thousand conversations between them, ones said and ones not and some he thinks he maybe only ever had in his head. He can’t be sure.  
  
Closing his eyes, he breathes out. It’s getting harder, holding on to things. His hand clenches, but the pen still clatters to the floor. He gropes for it, knowing there are more things to be written, more half-formed thoughts to purge, but Cater gets there first.  
  
“Enough,” she says, picking up the pen, slipping it into her pocket and out of reach. “That’s enough.”   
  
He tries to find any last vestige of fight left, but the truth is that he’s slipping faster than ever, and she knows it. It’s over. It’s about time his body admitted what his mind has long known.  
  
He holds the papers out to her.   
  
She takes them cautiously, her eyes sliding incomprehensibly across the lines of symbols. “Daniel?” she asks.  
  
He nods, wanting to emphasize how important this is, but not having the words. The way she carefully folds them and tucks them into her pocket tells him that she knows anyway.  
  
It’s all he can do.  
  
“You should rest,” she says, hovering near his elbow.  
  
He pushes to his feet, automatically turning towards his berth, but she gestures towards the center of the hold instead. He’s not sure why, but doesn’t have the words to argue anyway. Clearing a stack of boxes, he sees that she’s set up a rudimentary pallet on top of a low collection of crates. It’s only when he lies down that he gets it.  
  
She’s left the doors to the front cabin open, giving Jack a clear view of the stars flying past them. Lying there watching them, they give him the illusion of falling fast, tumbling downward.  
  
It’s nothing he hasn’t seen a thousand times before, streaking beams of light speeding past him, but he can’t quite remember the last time he actually watched them. The feeble attempt resurrects a barrage of half-forgotten missions, close calls, and being so painfully alive. There’s nothing untouched or solid enough to latch onto anymore though. He doesn’t try. Holding on only makes things slip faster.   
  
He closes his eyes.  
  
When next he wakes, she’s lying next to him.  
  
She’s not touching him, a nice careful distance between their bodies, but she’s there, being here with him, staring out at the stars as they streak past. Even with the lights turned down, there is just enough starlight to see her face, and, God, she’s still so damn beautiful.  
  
He tenses as the dangerous thought fills his mind, waiting for the inevitable.  
  
It doesn’t come.  
  
There’s nothing in here but him now, him and the culmination of knowledge of a species far more advanced than any of them dared imagine. Wisdom too, which he hadn’t expected. It fills all the dark spaces, pushing out anything extraneous.  
  
Smothering that dark voice.  
  
He says the only word he has left. “Carter.”  
  
Moving inch by inch in a slow crawl that only either of them could ever appreciate, her hand crosses the space between their bodies, fingers brushing across the back of his hand.  
  
It’s the first time she’s willingly touched him, made that move across the impenetrable distance between them.  
  
He turns his hand, his palm opening, and feels her fingers thread through his.  
  
Somehow, it doesn’t feel like he’s falling quite so fast anymore.


	7. Earth

“We’re approaching the rendezvous point, sir.”   
  
Jason Reynolds acknowledges his navigator with a nod. The hyperdrive countdown shows less then five minutes until they will arrive in the space surrounding Earth. Five minutes until they finally go home.  
  
They’re ready for this. Two years of careful planning, building relationships with allies, layering contingency after contingency, and all that’s left to do is execute.   
  
They revert back to normal space, and they are no longer alone because by their side is the rest of the fleet, a mix of makes and models and species, all honed to a single sharp-edged sword.  
  
A fleet large enough to outnumber even Anubis’s.   
  
“Pick up designated targets and fire all weapons,” Jason orders.  
  
All around them the fleet opens fire, catching Anubis’s floundering ships completely off-guard. The first ha’tak explodes, easily overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Jason lets himself feel an imprudent spark of relief. They’re going to pull this off.  
  
“Sir! There’s movement near the Moon!”  
  
Jason whips his head around, taking in the data coming in. A second fleet they didn’t know about? Or backup arriving already? It would be too much to hope that one last Asgard ship has decided to appear out of the mists, but his mind goes there, goes everywhere, the battle still sharp and furious around them.  
  
But it isn’t a second fleet that slowly appears out of the shadows. It’s a single ship. Not Asgard. But something absolutely enormous, so big that it had taken an entire moon to properly hide it.  
  
“What the hell is that?” the navigator blurts, horror squeezing his voice.  
  
It’s like a giant, fat spider hovering on the edge of its carefully spun web. Patient, confident.   
  
Utterly unsurprised.  
  
The ruthless stab of adrenaline crystallizes everything in Jason’s mind. He can see it now, each tiny step, each dangled lure, how the pieces all come together to equal them offering up to Anubis the entirety of the last pockets of resistance in one fail swoop.  
 _  
Let them come to me._  
  
“It’s a trap,” someone says, but Jason doesn’t need the words. He already knows what he’s done.   
  
He’s led them all to their deaths.  
  
* * *  
  
The ship lurches to the right, nearly unseating Rodney. He clamps on the edge of the consol and bites back a caustic remark about Cam’s dubious flying abilities. The task at hand does not allow the extra computational distraction of articulating the perfectly cutting remark (yes, it is _that_ complicated), and if you aren’t going to do it well, why bother?  
  
Rodney’s fingers fly over the controls, algorithms and numbers and variables aligning, slipping into place.   
  
“Just one more…,” he says, biting down on his lip.  
  
The package disappears in a flash of white light.  
  
“Done!” he crows, fist pumping in the air, adrenaline swamping his body. Add yet another impossible made possible to the CV of Dr. Rodney Freaking McKay.  
  
“Finally,” Cam shouts, the ship lurching yet again, rocking under what Rodney is only now registering are weapon’s blasts. Can’t a guy have at least one unmolested moment to revel in his genius?  
  
“What the hell are you doing?” he demands, scrambling towards the front of the ship. They were supposed to stay way out of the fighting. They were _supposed_ to be cloaked.  
  
Cam makes a sound alarmingly close to a growl. “I’m trying to keep us alive!”  
  
Rodney doesn’t remember anyone mentioning getting blown out of the sky being part of this particular mission. Of course, glancing at the scans of the battlefield as he settles into the second seat, he also doesn’t remember any mention of a freaking gargantuan Death Star either.   
  
“Looks like Anubis knew we were coming,” Cam says, pitching the cargo ship into a tight roll that really shouldn’t be possible. The walls around them groan in protest against the g-forces.  
  
“Oh _really_!” Rodney yelps, wondering why the hell they never put seatbelts in these goddamned things. Something to bitch about at a later point in time, _if_ they survive.  
  
One of the Valedian ships near them shatters in a ball of fire, Rodney flinching back from the light. Cam lets out a heartfelt string of curses that Rodney thinks are perfectly appropriate to the situation. After all, Anubis’ ship is cutting through their forces with ease, and even he recognizes a losing battle when he sees one.  
  
“Why don’t they jump away?” he mutters, eyes darting across the information being pumped into his screen.  
  
“I don’t know,” Cam says, his voice strained as he zags them through another physics-defying set of maneuvers.   
  
Then all the information in front of him crystallizes. “Because we can’t,” Rodney says, the color draining from his face. “There’s some sort of field being generated by that overgrown ship. It’s making it impossible to create a stable hyperwindow.”  
  
There’s a moment of silence as that information sinks in.   
  
Another blast passes far too closely, the ship shuddering in its wake. “So you’re saying we’re stuck here,” Cam says.  
  
Rodney nods. “We’re stuck.” And _dead_. This last long shot seems to have been just a bit too long.   
  
Cam’s face hardens. “Okay then. Let’s take as many of these bastards out as we can then.”  
  
Rodney glances down at Earth below them. He gets one last glimpse, and then Cam slams the ship into motion.   
  
* * *  
  
Sam and Jack lurch out of hyperspace into a war zone.  
  
It takes Sam a moment to reconcile what she’s seeing, the dizzying sweep of smaller vessels in between ha’taks, and in the distance, a hulking ship larger than anything she has ever seen before. She recovers long enough to engage the cloak, swerving to avoid a collision with a death glider.  
  
“They pushed up the attack,” she says, finally locating the lone Earth-designed ship out in the chaos. Why the hell would they push up the attack?   
  
A single shot from the behemoth of a ship arcs across the battlefield and a ha’tak explodes. Sam winces back from the flash of light, the loss of precious life. Holy God, this must be how Abydos died.   
  
She knows then that even if they can get rid of the drones, get past that hurdle, there’s nothing to stop Anubis from just cutting his losses and blasting what’s left of Earth into nothing more than space dust.  
  
“We’re too late,” she whispers, horror in her stomach.  
  
Jack bumps into her, his hand insistent on her shoulder as he shoves her out of the way. He takes the controls from her and she doesn’t know what else to do but let him.  
  
She glances at his determined face, the hard line of his jaw beneath the sheen of sweat on his face. Is this what he somehow knew? Why they rushed back here? It seems too much of a coincidence not to be. But rather than jumping into the fray, he banks the ship away, slipping down into the atmosphere of the planet.  
  
She wants to ask where they are going, but knows there isn’t any point. He’s on autopilot now, his body moving through the motions with no trace of thought, no light left in his failing body.   
  
Jack’s already long gone.  
  
It threatens to paralyze her for a moment, this terrible realization, but she hasn’t come this far, pressed through each and every painful crawling step just to fall apart at the penultimate moment. This is what he wants, she reminds herself.   
  
For once, she will be strong enough to respect that.  
  
He settles them over what looks to her like nothing more than an endless stretch of ice. Jumping out of the seat, he rushes back to the cargo hold.  
  
“Jack,” she says, but he doesn’t slow down, returning to the rings with the stained glass cone from the Ancient compound, pausing only long enough to shove a thick parka into her hands, not bothering with one for himself.  
  
He looks at her expectantly, his eyes connecting with her and for the smallest moment it feels like _him_ , asking her to trust him just one more time.  
  
She pulls the parka on, stepping up next to him on the platform. “I’m ready.”  
  
* * *  
  
Daniel kneels near the escape pods, trying to hold himself steady as Jacob twists and winds the ship down through the battlefield.   
  
“A cloak won’t keep them from blasting us out of the sky by accident,” Vala hisses from next to him, her face pale and drawn.   
  
Daniel glances at her, but doesn’t respond. So far the mission to take back Earth hasn’t gone exactly to plan, but that isn’t exactly unusual for them. Frankly, he’d be more surprised if it had gone to plan. He doesn’t think she’d find that particularly comforting though, so keeps it to himself.  
  
“Face it,” Vala snaps. “Anubis knew you were coming!”  
  
“Apparently,” Daniel says, relaxing a bit as the ship dips into the relative safety of the lower atmosphere. Considering what’s waiting for them below, that really says something about the chaos of the battlefield they’ve just escaped.   
  
“You can’t mean to go through with this,” Vala shouts, her voice going a bit shrill with disbelief.  
  
“We stick to the plan,” Jacob says, his face grim. “Take the gate, let the forces from Hak’tyl through, and take the compound.”  
  
“But that ship--,” Vala protests.  
  
“We stick to the plan,” Jacob persists with the insistence of one with nothing left to lose.  
  
Daniel sees Vala’s hand twitch, and wonders if that is her sense of self-preservation kicking in. She must be wishing she’d been smart enough to walk away now. He wonders if he’ll ever get the chance to find out why she didn’t.  
  
Then the tel’tak touches down with a soft thump and there’s no more time for second-guessing.  
  
* * *  
  
Teal’c stands in front of the rippling waters of a wormhole, Ishta by his side. On the other side lies the planet where all of this began, not just the battle with Anubis, the rebellion, but the very origin of their kind. The original world.  
  
Earth.  
  
Teal’c lifts his radio. “Daniel Jackson, this is Teal’c. Are you in position?”  
  
There is a moment of static before a familiar voice answers. “You are clear to come through,” Daniel Jackson says.  
  
Ishta steps forward, eager to begin this fight, but Teal’c holds her back. Keying the radio, he speaks into it. “How is the weather today, Daniel Jackson?”  
  
The prescribed answer comes immediately. “Nice and sunny with winds from the Northwest. Perfect barbeque weather.”  
  
Teal’c feels his stomach settle. “We are on our way.”  
  
He pauses at the wormhole, turning back to see the wave of Jaffa behind him. Many watch him with expressions he knows well—anticipation, expectation—like they have mistaken him for their leader. Like he is a man who has answers he does not.  
  
But in this one last thing, he can do his duty to them.   
  
“Jaffa,” he calls, his voice loud and clear over the meadow. “ _Ai’emain_!”   
  
The shuffling crowd falls silent, backs straightening, emotions pulling taut.   
  
Teal’c faces them with legs braced wide, staff firm and unyielding against the stone platform. He lets the silence stretch long as he moves his eyes across the crowd, making each warrior feel seen and acknowledged. Counted.   
  
“Today is the day we take our revenge,” he says. “The day we wipe one final false god and tyrant from the galaxy. Today we cast off our yokes and face our fate with open hearts and clear minds, knowing right will prevail. We will not falter. We will not fail. We are Jaffa.”  
  
He lifts his staff above his head. “ _Shel kek nem ron_!”  
  
An answering cry rings loud over the rattle of weapons lifted in proud fists.   
  
He turns to Ishta, his voice softening. “Today, I die free.”  
  
“Perhaps,” she says, comfortable with that fate. But then her lips quirk with the impertinent self-confidence that he has grown to love so well. “Though if given the choice, I will _live_ free.”  
  
He touches her cheek. “So may it be.”  
  
For all Jaffa.  
  
* * *  
  
The rings deposit Sam and Jack into what at first glance looks like an ice cave. She fights of a wave of déjà vu, the press of being trapped, the way the cold air bites and tugs at her skin.   
  
Watching him die.  
 _  
Nothing you can do to change that._  
  
Jack strides out into the space, seemingly unhampered by the lack of light or lack of familiarity with the space, like he’s been here before. Sam forces her feet to follow. In the dim blue light, she can make out shapes and spaces, little more than shadows. The passage opens out into a large room, an ornate chair isolated in the middle.   
  
Jack paces straight past it, kneeling in front of a hatch and sliding the stained-glass cone into place. The walls around them creak and hum, the rumble of long-slumbering technology shaking itself awake.  
  
Jack approaches the chair, settling into it like he somehow belongs there. It seems to know him, coming to life under his touch. She watches man and chair shifting and expanding to accommodate each other.   
  
His hands dig into the soft gel of the armrests, panels and displays lighting in a ring around the walls. Sam steps closer to one, ancient words flying across the screen at an alarming pace. But next to it, a visual display of the battle being waged far, far above them.  
  
A battle being lost.   
  
“Jack,” Sam says, turning back to look at him.  
  
The chair snaps backwards, lying Jack out flat, his face staring unseeing at the ceiling.  
  
The compound screams to life.  
  
* * *  
  
Teal’c ducks back behind the frame of the door, barely missing getting hit by drone fire. He darts a glance at Daniel Jackson on the other side, his eyes automatically sweeping his body for sign of injury. He can just make out the hard profile of Vala Mal Doran pressed against Daniel Jackson’s back, keeping their retreat clear.   
  
Satisfied, Teal’c sucks in a breath and drops to a crouch, pivoting on the ball of his foot and sweeping his staff around the jamb. He feels the foreign surge of energy through his weapon as the blue pulses hit their targets, black-clad drones tumbling to the floor.  
  
“Clear!” a voice calls from the other side.   
  
Teal’c has to step over the body of a fallen Jaffa to enter the hall, but does not pause to mourn or identify, merely pushes onward, feeling the momentum building as they penetrate further and further into Anubis’ palace.  
  
The next section of the complex opens out into a large atrium with high ceilings and a bank of windows and balconies. A good location for a trap.  
  
“There are too few,” Ishta observes, flattening herself against the wall on his side.  
  
Teal’c nods, having noticed this as well. The drone soldiers, having realized their vulnerability, have more than likely calculated the wisdom of regrouping and using their numbers against the intruders. This is a problem, because even if Anubis’ soldiers fall easily to the drone weapon, their sure aim is still just as deadly to their side.   
  
Teal’c has never been more aware of the preciousness of each and every individual life, these few Jaffa left who fight. His training names this a weakness.   
  
“We must proceed with caution,” he says.  
  
She nods, slipping down the hall with a handful of her warriors to circle around to the side. On the proper count, they sweep into the space, weapons at the ready. There is no one there.  
  
The atrium remains empty, but the tightness in Teal’c’s neck does not dissipate.  
  
“Teal’c,” Daniel Jackson calls. He stands at the bank of windows, pointing up towards the sky. “What is that?”  
  
Teal’c crosses to his side, staring up at yellow lights like comets streaking upwards into the atmosphere. “I do not know.”  
  
Yet another new weapon Anubis has discovered to use against them?  
  
“Teal’c, watch out!” Daniel Jackson shouts.  
  
He twists to one side, but not quickly enough, because the awaited ambush has finally materialized with brutal force, a blast catching his shoulder, his weapon clattering uselessly to the floor as a wave of drones sets upon them from the shadows.  
  
Far too many.  
  
“Teal’c!” someone shouts, but everything around him has slowed to painful stillness, his body straining to reach the fallen weapon, every detail and sensation pitilessly sharp.  
  
The drone presses his advantage. It will not miss a second time.  
  
Across the compound, Ishta turns, the light rippling across her hair. Her mouth opens, weapon lifting.  
  
It will not be in time.  
  
His thoughts, as he watches death coming, turn to Rya’c and Bra’tac, to father and son and comrade—the future he meant to give them, if only he could have.  
  
But before the final shot comes, there is an enormous rumbling explosion, a sonic pulse that makes the air vibrate around them.  
  
The drone stops.  
  
All of the drones stop.  
  
* * *  
  
For a while it’s like Jack is no longer in his body but floating above Earth. He’s flying with the streaks of light as they zoom in and out of Anubis’ fleet. He’s standing in front of Anubis sitting on his giant throne, staring straight into that fathomless emptiness that isn’t a face.  
  
“You,” Anubis hisses.  
  
Jack sees him. Sees exactly what he is, the pieces sliding into place. “Time’s up,” Jack says.  
  
Anubis’s hands lift, a deep groan of protest rising from his body that is nothing but a shell.   
  
Everything dissolves into a giant flash of light, other beings pressing in close, watching, and it’s so damn beautiful, the way everything flies apart at the seams.  
  
The span of a breath and Jack is slamming back down into the chair, trapped once more in the heavy material of his failing body.  
  
“Anubis’s fleet,” Carter is saying, her voice sounding as if from a great distance. “It’s gone. Just…gone.”  
  
It’s done.  
  
There’s still a long, messy battle to be fought for Earth. He’s just evened the odds a bit, taken the false god out of the equation. For now. He hopes it’s enough.  
  
It will have to be.  
  
“Jack?” Carter asks.  
  
He blinks, his lids heavy and nearly impossible to lift again.  
  
“Jack,” she says, her voice rushing back across the room, her body pressing near.  
  
With great effort, he opens his eyes to find her leaning over him, and it could just as easily be that dark night over five years ago on Cimmeria. The night he hadn’t bothered to fight, welcoming the promise of blackness, not wanting the life she had forced upon him. But today she doesn’t beg, words or not. She doesn’t ask him to fight or hang on, just stands over him with tears in her eyes, but resolve on her face.  
  
She’s letting him go.  
  
It’s his choice this time. Beneath everything buzzing in his mind, the confusion and pain, he at least knows that. This is his choice to make. Not hers, not Anhur’s. He gets to decide his end.  
  
This is what he’s always wanted, the thing he’s been hunting for so damn long—a significant death, a purposeful death. He’s saving his entire planet with this sacrifice. His debt paid in full.  
  
He’s free.   
  
No mission, no responsibility trapping him in place. He just has to let go. Finally.  
  
But as he sits with Carter staring down at him and his mind crumbling into chaos with the Ancient’s hard won secrets only getting louder, he finally understands that there really isn’t such a thing as a good death. That’s just another myth he’s been chasing. He owes that to her at least, being honest about the fact that this isn’t heroism—it’s indulgence. An exit plan disguised as sacrifice.  
  
He looks up into her face, and she somehow manages a smile for him, the fractured gesture squeezing out the tears she’s been trying to hide. “It’s okay, Jack,” she says, her words shaky, but resolute. “It’s okay.” Her voice cracks, falters, but she pushes on. “You don’t have to fight anymore.”  
  
She’s trying to tell him she understands his choice, trying to make it easy for him, despite what it costs her. It should be a comfort—absolution from the one place he never thought to find it. Only there’s something else welling up in his chest now as he looks at her, drowning the relief.   
  
Carter leans closer to him, her whispered words nothing more than a hum now, but he can see it in her gaze that she’s going to be here until the very end. One more impossible task she’s incapable of walking away from. And, God, there it is, a well of feeling he thought lost, destroyed, or maybe just mutilated beyond recognition. But it’s here, hiding underneath all the wreckage—different maybe, changed, but whole and rooted bone deep.  
  
Somehow, no matter how mixed up everything is, he finally gets it, the fundamental truth sliding into place as she stands there being so damn brave, letting him go.  
  
None of this has ever been about who owes who, about some invisible score. It’s not even about the goddamn snake. The dead don’t matter.  
  
Only the living.  
  
He tries to say her name, but the word that slips out is something else entirely, his choice made before he’s completely aware of it. “ _Dormata_ ,” he whispers. It’s a tiny chance and nothing more, but it’s his choice, his decision.   
  
His.  
  
Carter spends a precious second staring down at him in confusion, trying to puzzle out what this means. He tries to repeat the word, to imbue it with urgency, but can’t quite manage it. His eyes flick past her to the device he recognized on the way in, the salvation it represents. The small motion is almost too much, but it isn’t wasted on her, her eyes lifting and latching on to the machine.   
  
She hesitates, no doubt thrown by this abrupt change in plans. Her indecision doesn’t last though. Another precious tick of the clock and she’s hefting him to his feet. He wishes he could help but it’s taking every ounce of concentration not to give in to the seductive, silent blackness hovering right around his edges.  
  
He so longs for the quiet.  
  
Somehow she manages to drag him across the room and lift him into the space, and he never should have doubted her considering all the miraculous things he’s seen her do. His head rests back against the wall as he summons his last bit of energy to communicate with the device.  
  
Instead of moving away though, Carter steps even closer, one hand lifting to his face, hesitating just before making contact, her palm pressing to his cheek. She holds there, the warmth of her skin in stark contrast to the ice all around them.  
  
“Jack,” she says, her voice loaded with things it might take a lifetime to decipher.   
  
He thinks maybe she understands now too.  
  
She steps back and he sends the command, feels the energy of the technology surge up around him.  
  
“ _Unam sumis_ ,” he whispers as the ice crawls up his body, her face wavering in his vision.  
  
She’s the last thing he sees.


	8. Epilogue

On Earth, a young woman looks out over what had once been a town square, her eyes pulled upwards above the trees and grass. An explosion of light is melting down through the blue summer sky like rain turned to fire. Despite the spectacular display, there are no other curious faces in the windows on the square, all the shutters closed tight. Even still they must see it, this light show in the sky, must know what it means. But they are too browbeat, too frightened to step outside, to risk betraying an emotion. To hope.   
  
But Cassie knows what this is, has been waiting for it for two years.  
  
Finally.  
  
This town had once been called Attica, a tiny village among the fields of Kansas. Now it is a holding pen for survivors, small-town America reborn as a ghetto of a dying race. There are people here from all corners of the continent, drawn in out of desperation and the illusion of protection offered by the very being that conquered their planet.   
  
_Worship and you will live._  
  
They flocked here like chickens to a coop, the inhabitants too stupid to realize it’s really only a slaughterhouse. Or maybe even the slaughterhouse was preferred to the impossible, horrific lives they could scrape together out in the world Anubis left them with: empty, shattered cities and roving bands of humans reverting to the lowest common denominator just to survive. Such a small amount of time to have forgotten so much evolution.  
  
This is what is left of the planet her mother fell protecting, a planet Cassie refused to walk away from even when she had the chance. Not this time. Not again. Someone had to stay and fight. Stay and remember.  
  
Plus, she’s never been alone. Not completely. She is their eyes, a quiet whisper from the planet they’ve been exiled from. They always said they’d be back. In the meantime she would be what they need.  
  
 _Tok’anu_. The resistance.   
  
She knows what the lights in the sky mean.  
  
Abandoning her perch at the window, Cassie moves to the rear of her room. Behind a creaking wooden door is a staircase. She picks her way down the rickety steps into the cool darkness of the basement. The previous owner had outfitted his home well, his 1960s nuclear paranoia coming back to serve her well. The entrance to the bunker is barely visible unless you know where to look. Cassie pulls back the heavy lead doors, the hinges well oiled and maintained, sliding open with barely a whisper of sound.   
  
Grabbing a lantern, Cassie lowers herself into the space below.  
  
Where there had been bare floor only this morning, now there’s a pile of crates, a note tacked to the top. She reaches for the thin slip of paper, her fingers running across the words.  
 _  
Thought you might be able to put these to good use. Red button = death to drones. One hit should do it. Be seeing you soon. -Mitchell_  
  
Pushing off the top of the nearest crate, she reaches in and pulls out a P-90 that’s been modified, a shiny red button on the side that screams to be pushed.   
  
Looking up the stairs to the square of light above, she knows exactly what to do with it, this gift from the skies.  
  
Outside, the square is quiet. The tall fences that mark the boundary of their coop glint brightly in the sunlight. There should be work happening all around, men offering passes to get out into the fields, women completing chores on the square, and small children getting their lessons in the shade of Anubis’ statue. But no one is in sight.  
  
Attica’s jail keepers, two tall figures cloaked in black, impenetrable armor, stand as they always do at the gate, unaware of the shift around them. Nuance is not something they ever understood. Rules are rules. Crimes are crimes. And penalties are swift and final.  
  
They don’t move as Cassie approaches, docile like kittens despite the weapon in her hands—a visible violation of the cardinal rule of human rights. She thinks despite their outer calm they must be floundering in the wake of what she suspects— _prays_ —is their master’s fiery destruction. Their eerie motionlessness is just more proof. They’re empty shells this way, animated flesh with no one to serve. Not that it changes anything. Her memory is long, even if theirs isn’t.  
  
She lifts her weapon, the red button smooth under the pad of her finger. The first one falls under the pulse like a sack of potatoes, the second merely looking down at its fallen companion in curiosity. Cassie doesn’t give him time to figure it out.  
  
When they are lying side by side on the ground like sick marionette dolls with their strings cut, Cassie turns to the imposing statue marring the center of the square, its empty face watching over the town, always watching. Candles and flowers and food and other forced offerings are nestled into place next to small notes begging for boons, for word of long-missing loved ones. _If you really are a god, have mercy._  
  
Switching her P-90 back to bullets, she fires on the statue, pounding round after round into the heavy stone. Anubis’s head severs at the neck, bouncing sickly down the path to come to rest in the gutter lining the street. There’s a moment of heavy silence as if the entire town is waiting for the wrath of this supposed god to rain down in retaliation for her desecration.   
  
It doesn’t come. There’s nothing but the warm prairie wind rising up over the town, untamed by boundaries or rules or oppressive domination.  
  
No more false gods for Attica.  
  
Around her, screen doors creak open, footsteps cautiously inching out into the sunlight.


End file.
